Nurses at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital are threatening to withdraw their services if a one-week ultimatum to authorities to address the issue of inmate-aggression against the nurses remains unresolved.
The group is worried the spate of attacks by some of the inmates is compromising their safety.
According to the spokesperson of the nurses, Philip Okyere, their action has been necessitated by a recent attack on a staff, who is also a nursing mother at one of the female observation wards, which left her injured last week.
“We don’t have access to the essential medications we need to manage the patients. The effect is that the patients will not have access to their drugs and they will become aggressive towards the staff.
“We are complaining because have recorded so many aggressive behaviours towards staff which has resulted in injuries,” he said.
According to him, last week at the female observation ward, one of the aggressive patients used her hand to hit the abdomen of a nurse.
“The nurse who is a nursing mother was delivered of her new baby through a cesarean section and the hit affected the incision side of her abdomen. When she went home in the evening, she realised she was bleeding,” he narrated to Joy News.
The nurses are therefore calling on government to provide supplies to ensure inmates at the facility are properly medicated to prevent any further attacks, without which they would embark on a strike come Friday.
Mr Okyere and the other nurses are complaining about their safety which they say they can’t negotiate because the shortage of the medication has made the situation dire.
“The shortage borders on life and death and if we don’t get any immediate interventions whatever we are doing here will not yield to anything.
“That is why we are calling on government, we have given them one-week ultimatum which will expire next week Friday. If by then what we need is not provided, we are going to withdraw our services totally,” he stressed.
He noted that they are not admitting any new patients to the wards until they hear something positive from authorities.
-myjoyonline