WESTERN BUREAU — Even as the Government shifts its focus from institutionalised, to community-based, health care for the mentally ill, Joy Crooks, nurse/administrator of the Committee for the Upliftment of the Mentally Ill (CUMI), has decried the inefficiencies in the system.

At a recent forum at the St James Parish Council, Crooks cited the lack of personnel and equipment in the county of Cornwall, where community-based mental care has been in place for at least a decade.

According to Crooks, the Cornwall Regional Hospital’s psychiatric department has only one acute ward, with 32 beds; there is just one mental health social worker in the county, and two mental health officers care for the over 75 patients in St James.

Crooks has, in the past, been critical of the Government’s plans to gradually close Bellevue, the island’s sole mental health institution, as it moves the country towards community-based mental health care.

She has steadily argued that if the shortcomings at CRH were any indication of the future of the health care system once Bellevue is phased out, she could not support the planned closure.

“There is no community-structured health care right now,” Crooks argued.

Her description of what obtains locally was in stark contrast with the description supplied by the forum’s main speaker, Dr Adewale Troutman, about conditions in the United States.

Addressing representatives from the local government authority and mental health professionals, the director for Fulton County’s Department of Health and Wellness in Atlanta, Georgia said that in the US, mobile health care units and fixed shelters are used to address the needs of the mentally ill.

Dr Troutman pointed out that job training is also an important part of the rehabilitation process which helped the mentally ill re-integrate into society. Taking care of the mentally ill, he said, is a “tenacious and difficult programme”.