'Healthy' patients stuck at Bellevue
published: Monday | October 25, 2004

By Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter

MORE THAN 500 of the 800-odd patients at the Bellevue Hospital in Kingston, who are well enough to be discharged, are forced to remain in the institution because they have nowhere to live.

This is according to Dr. Earl Wright, director of the Mental Health Unit in the Ministry of Health, who said, "The reason they are not discharged is because they have nowhere to live. It is a no-win situation because the longer they stay in a hospital setting, the more they deteriorate and it also costs much more."

Dr. Wright made the disclosure while addressing the launch of an initiative to develop and implement policies and programmes for the homeless by the Ministry of Local Government, Community Develop-ment and Sport on Friday at the ministry's Hagley Park Road office.

SUPERVISED LIVING ARRANGEMENTS

To address the problem, he said, the ministry would be introducing a number of supporting and supervised living arrangements in collaboration with other government agencies.

Under this proposal, he said that it is being recommended that each supervised living arrangement would not have more than 25 persons. Justifying the recommendation, Dr. Wright said, "Once you start getting involved (with) large numbers, you are again getting into the institutionalisation, the people get disconnected from the community and you are running down a road where the outcome may not be as good as it should be."

He said that the Ministry of Health was committed to providing the technical staff to support this initiative. He also divulged the ministry's plan to pilot this initiative at the Kenroy Rehabilitation Centre for the mentally ill in Spanish Town, St. Catherine.

In addition, he said a drop-in centre is to be built on the grounds of the Bellevue Hospital with financial backing from the Culture, Health, Arts, Sports and Education (CHASE) Fund. Meanwhile, Dr. Wright said that the number of homeless people living on the streets of Kingston and St. Andrew ranges from 255 to more than 400. About 60 per cent of them are mentally ill.