More than 400 clients and 61 staff members face an uncertain future when a Gippsland mental health support service closes its doors for the final time today.
Retired school teacher and ambulance volunteer Frank Bailey was among those who had been helped by the not-for-profit organisation Within Australia (WA) over its 30 years of service.
"I got called to a lot of incidents and some of them didn't go well," he said.
"There was an incident where a girl the same age as my daughter drowned at a school event. I was called and tried to resuscitate her and she died.
"I was MC at a debutante ball [where] a guy had a heart attack and he died. Those things add up."
As his fixation on safety increased, Mr Bailey retreated from society.
"I just had a meltdown. It was a complete collapse on the footpath, curled up in the foetal position," he said.
Mr Bailey was admitted to The Alfred hospital in Melbourne for acute mental health care and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety, and major depression.
When he returned to Bairnsdale in eastern Victoria he started attending group sessions at WA, which quickly became his only social interaction.
'Close to the wind'
Janice Chesters was a founding figure for WA in the 1990s, using her research with Monash University to advocate for housing support for people with mental illness.
Over the last decade as a board member, she watched funding shift from state government grants to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
"As the NDIS moved across the state, we saw our funds from the state government decrease and people were either put onto the NDIS or they didn't make it," Ms Chesters said.
"The PHN [Primary Health Network] then started funding that support from us to help those people get in to the NDIS or to provide them some services on a short or medium basis to tide them over."
WA lost the tender to provide those services following an overhaul of the organisation's board earlier this year.
That left the new board with a hole in their budget and the threat of insolvency.
"The organisation's been pretty close to the wind before, but in more recent times we had resources to back us up and our own property in Bairnsdale," Ms Chesters said.
Operating at a loss
Board member Dan Mellish said its operating cashflow equated to a loss of $38,000 per week.
"That meant that we had five weeks left before we were cashflow insolvent," he said.
"The law says as a director if you form either insolvent, or about to become so imminently, then you must put the organisation into administration so that's, regrettably, what we had to do.
"The law is crystal clear."
Administrators from consulting firm EY were appointed on May 19 and the end for WA came quickly.
They took over the running of day-to-day services across the service's four Gippsland offices.
Their aim was to not disrupt care for clients.
WA general manager of corporate services Julie Ellen said that did not happen.
"It's just been terrible."
Ms Ellen said her employment was terminated two days before WA was set to close after she sent an expletive-laden email to board members, defending the service.
EY's Oceania restructuring leader Adam Nikitins has been overseeing the process and said the PHN agreement accounted for 25 per cent of the organisation's revenue.
"Fewer than 10 employees actually serviced that agreement, which meant that the PHN revenues were subsidising the rest of the business, so when that fell away the cost base was too high," he said.
EY ran an expressions of interest campaign to continue the services of the organisation but received no formal offers to buy the business.
"We received about 25 expressions of interest," Mr Nikitins said.
"We had seven ultimately go through the due diligence process, but none of them were able to see a way through for Within Australia to be a sustainable entity moving forward."
The firm's administration fee has more than doubled from its initial quote, to more than $400,000 during the protracted administration.
Ms Ellen said she was concerned the fee would eat into the payouts of creditors of the service, most of which were local residents.
Staff members are expected to be paid out after being made redundant today.
Mr Nikitins said workshops had been held to help them find new positions.
