Gov’t to increase access to psychiatric care with $26M allocation

-plans for new ward

– new mental health legislation to come

Minister of Health, Hon. Dr. Frank Anthony says the Government plans to extend the psychiatric ward of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) with a proposed $26 million budgetary allocation to increase care for persons suffering from those conditions.

The Minister made this announcement in his COVID-19 update on Wednesday.

Dr. Anthony said mental health is a major concern and provisions are being made to treat persons with those conditions to ensure they can live quality lives.  As such, steps are being taken to expand accommodations for more patients at the GPHC.

“In addition to that, we have psychiatric beds in the New Amsterdam Hospital. One of the things is that when patients get acutely ill, they need somewhere they can come in and be hospitalised, stabilised and then we are able to send them home again, so that’s the reason why we need some additional beds.”

Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Hon. Dr. Ashni Singh proposed a $53.5 billion allocation for the public health sector in 2021. Of that sum, $70 million would be used to address the shortage of essential medication for psychiatric patients and $26 million for an 18-bed mental health ward at GPHC.

“We’re hoping that we would be able to implement that over the next couple of months.”

Dr. Anthony said the Government also plans to look at mental health legislation.

“We are in the process of drafting a new Mental Health Act, a Bill which would be going to Parliament.  There was one that was drafted in 2010, so we are currently consulting on that. We are going to revise that based on stakeholder feedback and so forth, and hopefully, we can get this Bill to Parliament as soon as possible.”

Minister Anthony said a suicide prevention plan is also being examined as well as one to address substance abuse and its link to mental illness.

“We also want to incorporate the component of our mental health programme to deal with substance abuse because this is an area that we feel that we are seeing a lot more cases, and therefore we have to address it.”

All these plans will be implemented over five years.

Dr. Anthony also noted that while a lot of assistance to address substance abuse has come from non-governmental organisations, the Government would be implementing its own programmes to deal with these challenges.