Nurses at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital are complaining of sexual harassment at the hands of inmates. The situation they say could get worse.
The assaults they say are mostly carried out by the inmates when they go to their various units to administer drugs to them.
A development that has been going on for years, the nurses have told Kasapa News they’ve had to on daily basis deal with the assaults which sometimes get aggressive.
“It is getting out of hand; the other day i went to one of the rooms to attend to one inmate, and he pounced on me. He said ‘i have been here for years without sex so today i must have sex with you’,” a female nurse told Kasapa News Adwoa Adubia.
Not peculiar to only female nurses, some male nurses have also told stories of how they’ve been sexually harassed by female inmates.
Ghana’s premier Psychiatric Hospital, it has and continues to serve a special health need.
During the period of colonization and before the introduction of scientific medicine, mental illness was treated with herbal medicine and spiritual rites.
However, on 4th February 1888, by a Legislative Instrument (LI) under the signature of the then governor, Sir Edward Griffiths, the old High Court of Victoria Borg was converted into Lunatic Asylum.
The wardens then looked after the patients. No medical treatment was given, and no real distinction made between the requirements of the mentally ill and those of the criminal. Over crowding in the prison promoted the building of a new hospital at Adadraka in 1904, and was called Lunatic Asylum; the present Accra Psychiatric Hospital. It was commissioned in 1906 to accommodate 200 patients.
About 110 patients were initially admitted into the new hospital under the charge of 16 untrained attendants. The hospital consisted of four wards; Female, Male, General and Criminal wards. The Lunatic Asylum later underwent modifications and extension into the Psychiatric Hospital with a bed capacity of 600.
