Door slams on place of healing

Drug and alcohol addicts from all over New Zealand have been through the doors of the Hanmer treatment centre and come out to a new life. MONIQUE DEVEREUX finds out why Hanmer is closing.


As soon as the kids were safely dropped at the school gates, Alison would race home and rip open the cardboard tab hiding the tap to her best friend - a cask of cheap white wine. As she vacuumed, cleared the breakfast dishes and scrubbed the bathroom floor her glass of wine was always within reach.

In the afternoon she would have a nap, setting the alarm to make sure she was up in time to pick up the kids.

The empty cask would be dropped in a rubbish bin on her way.

At night Alison would join her partner in enjoying a glass of wine with dinner - always from a nice, sophisticated bottle. More often than not she would finish most of it herself.

Later, to help her sleep, there was a hip flask of Southern Comfort in her bedside drawer. There was another hidden in the laundry behind the bulk bag of washing powder and one in the old suitcase in the bottom of the linen cupboard - just in case.

Alison began to accept there was a problem only on the day she slept through home-time. The children, then aged 5 and 6, walked 10km home to find her passed out on the bedroom floor in a drunken stupor.

"Those little legs walking all that way ... it really shocked me."

To make sure it didn't happen again she took the bladder of the cask wine in the car with her to school. If she started drinking earlier, she reasoned, she would sleep earlier and wake earlier. She set two different alarm clocks.

Alison can laugh at her "logic" now - she has been sober for seven years. She credits her success to the residential rehabilitation programme at the iconic Queen Mary Hospital in Hanmer Springs.

"I was pretty typical for a drunk. I hid it well for a long time before it destroyed my life. I was basically dragged into Hanmer kicking and screaming because I didn't have a problem."

The key to her recovery, she believes, was residential treatment.

"I really needed to be taken away from my life to fix it. There is no way I would have had the strength to get through this without that intensive round-the-clock care.

"They dried me out, got me back on my feet and got me strong enough to get back to my life. I really owe that programme everything."

At the end of next week Hanmer Clinics, its residential and five outpatient clinics, will cease to exist.

Until Thursday the closure was restricted to the residential programme but then came the shock announcement that the entire operation was closing down. The operating company's inability to pay out redundancy for its Hanmer Springs staff was the final nail in the coffin.

For the township of Hanmer Springs it marks the end of a 30-year relationship with drug and alcohol rehabilitation. An impending sale of the old hospital buildings and land may even spell the end of the town's ability to use the 15.5ha grounds as a park. In a tourist town the land - which borders the internationally known thermal springs resort - is prime real estate.

The residential closure was signalled last year with a Ministry of Health edict that the $9.8 million funding given to Hanmer Clinics Ltd be used for providing outpatient care only by the end of the three-year deal.

That meant gradually reducing the number of residential patients to a point where it was not viable to have the inpatient service running. That point was reached two weeks ago when the last patient to undergo the 35-day programme was admitted.

The withdrawal of Hanmer's residential drug and alcohol programme has been a long time coming. Over the past 30 years there have been several threats of funding reductions and closure, some prompting staff and patients to take to the streets in protest marches.

This time there will be no 11th-hour salvation.

But the Hanmer closure does not mean the Government will no longer finance residential services in general.

This week it was announced that a new Maori alcohol and drug service in the South Island would be financed to the tune of $500,000, featuring a 10 to 12-bed residential facility and a day programme.

A Government review of funding and quality of all rehabilitation services in the central and South Island regions is almost completed. Its brief is to ascertain the right mix for the range of patients needing treatment, both residential and community-based.

At the same time the Mental Health Commission is reviewing its five-year-old mental health blueprint, and the targets it sets for addiction services. That review will also address the required mix of treatment.

The Government says the motive to stop funding Hanmer is specific to that institution and the basic reason is that the service was no longer considered value for money.

There are other concerns that prompted the taxpayer dollars to be withdrawn. An audit of the service was given to the Ministry of Health this year but a ministry spokeswoman said it could not be released to the Weekend Herald at present as "more work" was required on it.

Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton's understanding is that the audit will never be made public because of the commercially sensitive nature of its findings. He says some of the issues it contains will eventually be revealed.

"There is no shock, horror, scandal but there are issues which these reviews have shown, that raised matters which have been under discussion. And the way in which they are under discussion is commercially sensitive."

The Queen Mary Hospital was built as a refuge for soldiers suffering the effects of World War I. Hanmer Springs itself is marketed as a healing place based on that history and the link to the drug and alcohol treatment programme.

Since the hospital became a dedicated treatment facility in 1972 some 18,000 people from all over New Zealand and around the world have entered the Hanmer programme.

It is not an easy place to get into. Patients must be chronically ill with the disease of addiction and be referred by other services. The intensive 35-day programme costs $10,800 a patient.

The setting is as picturesque and tranquil as advertised on the Hanmer Clinic's website. There is only one road in and out of the town - population 663 - and those who drive in do so on purpose.

The buildings are in chronic need of refurbishment. The patient rooms are spartan, to say the least. The clinical director's office has large cracks in one corner of the ceiling.

But outside the extensive grounds are peaceful and green, framed by trees. The view is 360 degrees of mountains, some rolling and green and some with sharp peaks covered in snow.

Until 1997 the service at Queen Mary Hospital was run by Healthlink South, which has evolved into the Canterbury District Health Board. It sold the business of treating addictions as a going concern to businessmen Rob Fenwick and John Beattie.

A member of Fenwick's family received treatment there, which reportedly moved him to put his money into the service.

They put $1 million into building up the service and the outlying outpatient facilities. Then last year they gave the business to a charity they had set up, the Hanmer Foundation.

That foundation has five trustees: Fenwick, Beattie, Barbara Stewart, Terry King and David Morgan. Beattie remains chairman of the Hanmer Clinics Ltd operating company.

The trustees will meet in the next couple of weeks to discuss their future. Yesterday Beattie was in Hanmer Springs talking to the staff about Thursday's announcement.

There are no official statistics to measure Hanmer's success or failure and clinical director Karen Scarf has not seen the Government audit. But she says the continued use of the service over 30 years speaks for itself.

She is a passionate believer in residential rehabilitation and says the absence of Hanmer's 60 beds will have a huge impact.

There are a number of other residential services around New Zealand, some funded by the taxpayer and others privately.

In the 2001-2002 year the Government paid for 519 residential beds across the country. Placements are usually made in the area the patient lives but in many chronic cases the patient will go to the first bed available.

One of the largest, and most similar to Hanmer, is the Salvation Army Bridge Programme. It has six residential rehabilitation centres. But at present all are full and there are waiting lists.

The scourge filling those beds is P. In the past two months at Hanmer half of the patients were P addicts. They were all extremely violent and needed to be removed from society to be cared for.

Alcoholism can take 10 years to destroy someone to the point where they need care in places such as Hanmer. Cannabis can take even longer, but the P users were all addicted within 16 months of using the drug.

Major Lynette Hutson of the Salvation Army says she is already starting to see the impact of Hanmer's closure.

She is wary of the P epidemic coming at a time when a major residential rehabilitation facility closes.

Yesterday some were still hoping for a last- minute reprieve.

The Health Cuts Hurts Campaign staged a protest outside the Labour Party conference in Christchurch, and one of the foundation trustees, Terry King, was hoping for a miracle.

He says he is alive only because of his second session at Hanmer, having spent many years downing a bottle of vodka a day while running an advertising agency.

"The greatest thing that could happen is that there would be such a groundswell of opposition to the closure that the ministry reassess its current position. Hanmer is the icon of recovery. Hanmer represents recovery and hope."

Hanmer Clinics