KATH Psychiatric Department cries for help

The management of the Psychiatric Department of the Ķomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi is appealing to the government and the general public to help it to expand its facilities in order to provide fully-fledged specialist psychiatric care to its patients.

The department, which is the only specialist psychiatric unit in the whole of the northern part of the country, has not seen any expansion since its establishment in 1981.

Currently, the unit lacks space to provide psychiatric care to the numerous patients who throng the facility daily.

OPD

On a daily basis, the department attends to nearly 100 patients with different types of mental conditions who throng the facility to seek mental health care.

In an interview with the Daily Graphic, the Head of the Psychiatric Department at KATH, Dr Ruth Owusu-Antwi, said the department did not have enough space to provide a holistic mental health care to the numerous patients who need their service.

She said the situation of inadequate space was such that three doctors had to use the small conference room of the department for consultation; a situation she described as inappropriate.

According to her, the lack of space denies the patients the opportunity to confide in the doctors since the setting does not allow it.

Some patients at the OPD of the Psychiatric Unit

Impact of COVID-19

Dr Owusu-Antwi said the coronavirus pandemic had worsened the plight of the psychiatric patients as they had to be scattered all over the place so as to observe the social distancing protocols.

“Now we do consultation within the corridors and expose the patients to the public when these things should have been done in the comfort of a spacious consulting room,” she observed.

The inadequate space at the ward also compels the facility to discharge patients “earlier before they really recover or before they can really go on to Outpatient care just to make room for other patients who badly need to be admitted.”

The ward has 11 beds, five for males and six for females.

According to Dr Owusu-Antwi, some of the psychiatric emergency cases that are brought to the Accidents and Emergency (A&E) Unit never get transferred to the Psychiatric Unit due to lack of space.

“And when we are at our wits ends, in some of these cases, we even discharge straight from the A&E to home, which should not be so,” she admitted.

Effect

As a result, she said a comparative research she conducted among the psychiatric units of KATH, Accra and Pantang hospitals showed that “our unit here has the highest relapse rate.”

This, she said, was as result of the practice of discharging patients before their full recovery due to the lack of space.

New design

She said per the new design for the expansion of the facility which was done in 2018, the unit would need a total of Gh¢1.5 million to add another storey to the existing facility.

She said the expanded facility would have a bigger Out Patient Department (OPD), a bigger ward that can take about 32 beds, a pharmacy with a counselling unit and bigger consulting rooms.

Currently, she said, the unit was using the kitchen of the hospital’s pharmacy as its pharmacy and the “place is so small that all the three pharmacists can’t sit there at the same time and cannot store all our medicines.”

Training

Apart from serving as the only specialist psychiatric unit in the whole of the northern part of the country, the unit is also accredited by the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons to provide specialist psychiatric training to medical students and doctors.

The Lead Clinician in charge of training at the department, Dr Francis Oppong, said due to the inadequate space, medical students undergoing psychiatric training had to be rushed through the programme.

“Because of inadequate space and the lack of personnel, the duration for their training in our department is also shortened so that they can all go through.

“So, it is also impacting on the quality of tuition we give them and the time they spend here and the space even compounds the problem,” he said.

According to him, the department trains on the average 200 medical students every year.

Dr Oppong thus called for support for the department to expand its facility to enable it to also improve on its training as the current situation “is affecting care, teaching and the acquisition of knowledge.”