MPs have been told that the non-availability of beds at South African mental health institutions was one of the contributing factors in the accumulation of state patients waiting for admission to psychiatric hospitals. One state patient has been waiting for a bed in an Mpumalanga prison since 2016.
Now calls have been made to amend the legislation dealing with mental health of state patients to ease the burden on overcrowded prisons.
A Weekend Argus report says this emerged when the Department of Correctional Services, with its health counterpart, briefed the Portfolio Committee on Justice & Correctional Services on the management of state patients in its prisons. The Department of Health’s Evah Mulutsi said the issue of hospital beds was one of the contributing factors in the accumulation of state patients waiting for admission to psychiatric hospitals.
“We have 14 designated psychiatric hospitals in the country,” Mulutsi said, which have a combined 2,214 bed-capacity. “On our database we have 8,000 state patients countrywide. Some are in the community as part of a leave of absence, an intervention we are implementing.”
Mulutsi said there was a need to review legislation to map out the process and unblock the bottlenecks contributing to the high rate of referrals for state patients. “We have submitted inputs to the Department of Justice to address the situation,” she said. She told MPs only 10 state patients had been discharged through court because “this process takes long and it significantly contributes to accumulation of backlogs”.
Weekend Argus Pressreader article – ‘Lack of beds leads to admissions delay’ (Open access)
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