Psychiatric Hospital Bleeds…

Whilst Oliver Commey Report Gathers Dust

Things have not been easy at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, due to lack of medicine; a patient last week killed his colleague, while some nurses have been assaulted by some patients, Anas Aremeyaw Anas reports.
Whilst the Accra Psychiatric Hospital is still reeling under a series of high profile immoralities and crimes of varying degrees, the Oliver Commey Committee Report, which has been sent to the Minister for Health, Dr. Benjamin Kumbuor, over a month now, and expected to address some of these short-falls in the mental health sector, is still at the shelves of the Minister gathering dust, The New Crusading Guide has learned.
The Oliver Commey Committee was set up by the Minister following an expose by our ace investigative journalist, of the inhumane conditions at the nation’s premier psychiatric hospital in Accra. All eyes are on the Oliver Commey’s report because its outcome is expected to feed into the all awaited Mental Health Bill.
Information gathered by the New Crusading Guide newspaper from the hospital reveals that, a patient who was put in Ward E Dormitory right in front of everybody ended up brutally killing one of his colleagues. After smashing his head several times on the walls of the dorm, he is said to have plugged out his eyes from their socket with blood gushing out freely.
“Seclusion rooms are meant for people like him but because of congestion we have to keep clearly dangerous patients with non dangerous ones”, a hospital source whispered. Also incidents of sodomy have been reported in some of the overcrowded wards. In recent times some patients have been spotted beating and threatening innocent nurses. Whenever it was reported to the Management of the hospital, nothing concrete was done because of lack of funds to employ proper security personnel to come to the aid of workers whenever there are such threats.
The New Crusading Guide newspaper has also been reliably informed that food for the patients is still bad whereas security in the hospital is still nothing to write home about. Medicines, our sources say, are still not supplied regularly and have been in short supply for a while until last week.
It is for these reasons that tongues are wagging as to why the Oliver Commey Committee report had not been made public though aspects of it are being implemented. The paper is reliably informed of some dismissals as wells as court actions against some of the staff of the hospital.
The Human Rights Advocacy Center, in its memorandum to the Oliver Commey Committee, recommended that there was the need for nurses at the hospital to undergo training on how to handle human right issues.
“We also recommend government to honour its international and constitutional obligations with the view of promoting and protecting the rights of persons with disabilities, and also improving and increasing access to mental health as a human rights”, the centre recommended further.
It also recommended that they adopt human rights training in all that they do at the hospital as most of the incidents the centre watched from the ‘madhouse’ story published in the New Crusading newspaper sometime ago bothered on human rights issues.
“Conditions of psychiatric patients in Ghana are unacceptable and clearly depict deficiencies in mental health care in Ghana. Mental patients are often stigmatized, discriminated, physically assaulted, deserted and grossly abused.
In a video report submitted to our offices on January 18, 2010 by Anas Aremeyaw of the ‘New Crusading Guide Newspaper’ mental patients are made to suffer serious human rights abuses at the hospital including physical and verbal assault by medical staff. Patients are neglected, made to do physically exhausting activities; they are force-fed medication and locked in rooms as forms of punishment. Some scavenge for food from refuse dumps, as they are poorly fed,” the memorandum stated.
Pressure is also piling up on government to pass the mental health bill as early as possible to ensure that some of these inhumane acts being perpetrated at the psychiatric hospital become a thing of the past.

Source: The New Crusading Guide/Ghana