"Health facilities are somewhat fragmented," he said. "[The Australian Defence Force] doesn't have the necessary assets to provide the care he really required and this means there are a series of potential holes into which the passage of information falls."
Suicidal soldier's depression not revealed to carers, doctor says
Les Kennedy
January 24, 2008
A MILITARY inquiry into the death of an army captain has been told that the senior medical officer at the navy's Balmoral Hospital did not tell a private drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic the officer was a suicide risk when he was transferred for treatment.
The decision by George Blackwood not to tell the St John of God Hospital that Andrew Paljakka had threatened to kill himself and twice attempted it after returning from Afghanistan was because the hospital did not want to be "stuck with him", he said.
"If we disclosed everything then they may not have taken him and we would be stuck with him," Dr Blackwood told the inquiry at Randwick Barracks during evidence in a three-week closed hearing in November that was made public yesterday.
The doctor's evidence also revealed that Captain Paljakka, 27, was binge drinking while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and using heroin and amphetamines. He took his life in a Kings Cross hotel on February 26 last year.
Suspicions of his drug use were not revealed to the clinic, which, the inquiry heard, would still have taken him as a patient, assessed his mental condition and would not have allowed him to abscond.
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