‘Lack of beds leads to admissions delay’

PARLIAMENTARIANS heard yesterday that the non-availability of beds at mental health institutions was one of the contributing factors in the accumulation of state patients waiting for admission at psychiatric hospitals.

The situation was so serious that there is a case of a state patient who has been waiting for a bed in a Mpumalanga prison since 2016.

Now calls have been made to amend the legislation dealing with matters of mental health of state patients to ease the burden on overcrowded prisons.

This emerged when the Department of Correctional Services, with its health counterpart, briefed the portfolio committee on justice and correctional services on management of state patients in its prisons.

Deputy Minister for Correctional Services Phathekile Holomisa said the department was doing the best it could for the state patients in its care.

“The shortage of beds continues to be a problem as it is much a problem for health centres outside correctional facilities,” Holomisa said.

In its report to the committee, the department said there were 119 state patients in its facilities as of February.

The report showed that Free State has 42 patients, followed by Mpumalanga with 24, Northern Cape 19, Eastern Cape 16, KwaZulu-Natal nine, Gauteng eight, Limpopo one and there were no patients in the North West and the Western Cape.

It also said there were 158 state patients that were brought to its facilities between May 2021 and February 2022.

The department said one of the challenges was the continual admission of newly declared state patients to correctional facilities due to unavailability of beds at designated mental health institutions.

The department said despite the challenges, there was collaboration with the national Department of

Health with designated psychiatrists coming to their facilities to render mental healthcare services to state patients.

Briefing the committee, 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, adding that the hospitals have a combined 2 214 bed-capacity.

“On our database we have 8 000 state patients countrywide. Some of them are in the community as part of leave of absence, an intervention we are implementing to try out beds.”

Mulutsi told MPs that there were 250 new state patients who were referred to their facilities last year.

“This is over and above the cases we have on our system. From January and February, we admitted 68 new state patients,” she said.

“If you look at bed availability we stand at 80% to 90% bed occupancy and utilisation in our facilities and that is why, with the accumulation of state patients, we can’t absorb immediately when a court order is issued.”

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 made strides as the Department of Health and submitted inputs to the Department of Justice to address the situation,” Mulutsi said.

She told MPs that there were only 10 state patients who were discharged through court because “this process takes long and it significantly contributes to accumulation of backlogs”.

Holomisa said ideally a mentally ill person was supposed to be taken to a mental hospital for treatment.

He also said provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act ought to be reassessed, maybe by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development.