The Accra Psychiatric Hospital is to petition the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to compel the Ghana Police Service and the judiciary to reclaim hundreds of mental patients sent there by the two bodies. The Medical Director in charge of the hospital, Dr Akwasi Osei, said the action had become necessary because more than 520 mental patients so far treated and discharged by the hospital and who could lead normal lives are still resident at the hospital because those who sent them there had refused to take them back. A large majority of them, he said, had been sent thee by the police and the courts to be examined to find out if they were of sound mind or not. Those found to be of unsound mind, he explained further, were treated and later declared cured and discharged, but when the Police and the courts were contacted, they refused to go forward to claim them. He said a few of the patients who had been treated had, however, been sent to the hospital by their families. The situation has created massive congestion at the hospital, which was built in 1906 to accommodate not more than 200 people but currently has 1,100 inmates. With further expansion work, the hospital has now been equipped with 500 beds and, as a result, the remaining 600 patients, sleep on the floor. Each ward, constructed to provide lodging for 60 people, is now forced to take 250 people. He disclosed further that apart from the people brought in by state institutions, some of the patients walked in themselves to receive treatment, while others were brought in by relatives or other hospitals. Under such severe pressure, Dr Osei disclosed that the hospital would have closed down today but for the timely intervention of the Ministry of Health, which sent the hospital some money yesterday. He said currently, 60Gp - was spent on feeding one patient per day, adding that the amount spent on food for the 520 discharged patients alone per year was GH¢1.3 million. "These are people who do not have to be here and this is partly responsible for our lack of funds all the time. The situation has resulted in huge financial difficulties for us," he added. He described the refusal to take the patients back as an abuse of human rights, on which CHRAJ must rule. The commission, he said, could compel the courts to go for the cured people or empower the hospital to discharge them. Dr Osei noted that there was currently no system or structure to deal with such issues and added that a mental health law would effectively deal with those issues. A mental health law, he said, would establish a mental health tribunal which could take decisions to discharge the cured patients or compel the traditional courts to do so. That law, he said, had been drafted for more than a year now but had been lying at the Ministry of Health, with no action taken on it. Dr Osei called for a total overhaul of the mental health system in Ghana, with emphasis on community care, as against institutional care. He explained that institutional care involved treating patients, within hospitals, while community care embraced the treatment of patients within communities. He also called for the training of more psychiatric nurses and debunked the notion that people were not willing to work in the psychiatry sector. He said last year, 13,000 people applied for admission to the nursing training colleges in Ghana but only 10 per cent were admitted, adding that some of the rejected applicants could have been trained as psychiatric nurses. "I believe that some of these problems are as a result of the attitude of the health authorities. We need to shift our paradigm on the issue of human training. By health authorities, I mean the technocrats and politicians," he said. The Ministry of Health last week sent letters round pleading with organisations, bodies and the general public who had patients at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital to go for them but Dr Osei, in reaction, said pleas had never worked and that it was time to take action. Source: Daily Graphic