The original article can be found in: Barbados Advocate By Jenna Marshall
There has been a marked decrease in the number of patients who have been admitted to the Psychiatric Hospital.
This from Health minister, Donville Inniss during a recent interview with The Barbados Advocate.
He revealed that the Ministry of Health had witnessed an approximate 5 per cent reduction in the number of residents at the Psychiatric Hospital from approximately 550 in-patients to 520 over a two and a half year period, adding that the figures for the number of repeat patients had also decreased.
He held that there existed the issue of addressing mental health from an early stage and as such sought to increase the number of mental health nurses to work in the community, later attributing the additional community staff as the reason behind the decrease in admitted patients.
He said, “There are approximately sixteen mental health nurses deployed throughout the polyclinic system that can go into homes and the wider community to perform early diagnosis care and treatment in the patient’s home and community environment. And as such, I believe this [decline] is in large measure to us going out into the community.”He added that mental health also needed the inclusion of sensitisation of families and the wider community on the topic. Inniss further stressed that persons needed to accept that such conditions were in fact illnesses which needed to be managed and had the possibility to be best managed in the home environment, resulting in only patients who were acutely ill being hospitalised or institutionalised.
As for the costs of the mental health programme on the island, the health minister revealed that the capacity of the island’s largest mental health institution, the Psychiatric Hospital rivalled that of the national health institution – the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, revealing an annual budget of thirty million dollars.
He disclosed, “It is costly; the mental health component of the Ministry of Health is in excess of 30 million dollars a year. The Psychiatric Hospital in terms of capacity is the same as the Queen Elisabeth Hospital, with 500-odd patients any day plus the number of out-patients makes it a very large and complex institution. There is therefore a plus to providing this service but perhaps there is a bigger cost to society if we do not provide the service.”
