Committee set up to probe neglect at Accra Psychiatric Hospital

Accra, Dec. 22, GNA - The Government is to set up a Committee of Inquiry to investigate allegations of institutional and administrative neglect, security failures and peddling of narcotic drugs at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital.

Dr. Benjamin Kunbuor, Minister of Health, announced this to journalists on Tuesday when he paid a working visit to the Hospital in Accra to ascertain the facts of Monday's publication of the allegations in an Accra-based newspaper.

The Minister has also tasked the Hospital's Administrators to submit a report by the close of today on the logistics needed to remedy the situation at the hospital for his consideration and action.

Mr Anas Aremeyaw Anas, an investigative journalist of the New Crusading Guide newspaper, said he posed as a patient to uncover the allegations and subsequently published them in Monday's edition of the newspaper.

The paper alleged that patients at the hospital were subjected to physical abuse and callous neglect by the nurses and that staff bought cocaine and cannabis for the inmates, while food meant for them were sold on the open market.

Dr Kunbuor described the issues uncovered by the publication as shameful and unfortunate, and stressed that they needed to be condemned.

"I must also register that what we have seen at the hospital is just a tip of the iceberg of the extent of institutional failures and administrative weaknesses that exist in the health delivery system in the country," he said.

Dr Kunbuor said the deplorable conditions would not be anything different at the non- mental health facilities in the country.

"My ministry would put in place measures to ensure that the sad situation that we have seen today does not recur and to ensure that we treat our mental health patients as people who are entitled to fundamental human rights, and that the patients cannot be treated as animals," he said.

On the issue of peddling of narcotic drugs by the hospital staff, the Minister said that perpetrators would be dealt with and the professionals found culpable would be appropriately sanctioned.

He said the ministry would immediately review the security at the hospital in order to forestall future occurrences.

Dr Kunbuor said government was committed to implementing a legal framework to address the outright contempt, neglect and segregation of mental healthcare from the non- mental health system, and to attach human rights approach towards healthcare delivery. He said that the publication had pushed government, stakeholders and the public to act in order to salvage the deplorable conditions at the mental health facilities. The Minister gave the assurance that he would confer with the Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Elias Sory, to beef up the staff strength at the psychiatric hospitals. Mrs Alice Asare Allotey, Deputy Director of Nursing Services at the Accra Psychiatric

Hospital, admitted that the situation at the hospital bordered on the issues of ethical and

administrative lapses. She said that the hospital was bedevilled with the issue of staff constraints owing to the

fact that many medical professionals were refusing postings to the mental health hospitals

based on the segregation and stigmatization society associated with mental health facilities.

"Currently there are about 1,200 patients in the hospital and there are only 280 nurses who need to render a 24-hour service to the inmates," Mrs Allotey said. She said that some of the nurses were presently on leave with a few of them currently at post who even suffered physical brutalities meted out to them by the mentally-challenged inmates.

"There is no motivation for the staff. Many of our family members and society have neglected us because of the stigma they attach to psychiatry."

She called on the public to embrace the rehabilitated mentally-challenged patients in order

to accept them back to their families. "About half of the 1,200 patients at the hospital are those who have been declared mentally

sound and discharged. Ideally, these should be with their families, but the difficulty is that they

return to the hospital because family members have neglected them." Mrs Allotey called on the Minister to take immediate and pragmatic steps to provide

logistics and beef up security so as to lessen the plight of both the patients and the medical

staff at the hospital.