Group slams hospital over quality of mental-health care
March 18, 2009
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Carola Vyhnak
URBAN AFFAIRS REPORTER
Walls were smeared with what looked like feces. Black mould covered the shower and bugs crawled in and out of a crack.
These were the living conditions Gord Holliday faced during his one-week stay as a mental-health patient at Rouge Valley Centenary hospital last month.
"I would never go back," says the Ajax resident, who was in crisis with thoughts of suicide when he was admitted.
Holliday's experience is part of a scathing letter sent to the board of Rouge Valley Health System yesterday by a community organization citing "intolerable conditions" and substandard care at the Scarborough hospital since 20 mental-health beds were moved there from Ajax to save money.
The plan to consolidate hospital services, announced last year to help dig Rouge Valley out of debt, angered residents who said the quality of health care would suffer.
The two-page letter from the Friends of Ajax/Pickering Hospital lists numerous complaints, including dirty rooms, insect infestation, overuse of patient restraints and the lack of a psychiatric intensive care unit, particularly when Rouge Valley Ajax Pickering has a new facility that's not being used.
It also raises concern about the danger from aggressive patients following an incident in January in which two nurses were injured.
"A year later, RVC is clearly unable to accommodate the volume of patients from the two original facilities ... and is apparently not maintaining basic hygiene and medical standards," says the letter signed by Friends' co-chairs Walter Donaldson and Yvonne Bosch.
"Putting patients in restraints for the convenience of hospital management is unconscionable."
The situation is reminiscent of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, about the dehumanizing conditions and treatment of patients in a mental hospital, Donaldson said.
"They made the decision to make the move and they rushed it before they were ready."
A Rouge Valley spokesperson said board chair Janet Ecker won't comment until she's reviewed the letter.
Toronto Star
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