Home for the holidays

With Christmas lights twinkling and the season of goodwill in full swing, Bellevue Hospital Chief Executive Officer Suzette Buchanan is making a heartfelt appeal to families: take your loved ones home for the holidays.

More than 400 patients who have been medically cleared for discharge are still living on the Kingston-based hospital’s compound, some waiting for decades for a family member to return.

Buchanan told The Gleaner that for a number of these individuals, Christmas has come and gone for as long as 50 years without a visit from home.

“For many of these individuals, they were dropped off by a family member, and they have not seen them since,” she said. “These are persons that are stable but do not have any social support, no family, no community or friends, so they reside at Bellevue Hospital.”

At Christmas, she stressed, the value of family connection becomes even more important. While medication plays a key role in treatment, love and familiarity provide a powerful form of healing.

“Pharmaceutical items can treat you to an extent; however, the familiar face, the hug, a walk down memory lane, resting on your mother’s bosom or just seeing your brother and remembering playing marbles, it does help their mental health,” she said.

She assured families that Bellevue does not simply discharge patients and leave relatives to cope on their own. The hospital offers guidance, follow-up care, and practical support to help families successfully reintegrate their loved ones into community life.

“We have an active family group,” Buchanan said. “[We meet] in the park, we have events, ... we help you out. We tell you how to manage, how to communicate – your tone, where to stand when you are talking to them. We tell you the avenue to get them in the institution if they are in distress. We tell you to ensure that they take their medication … . We help you with these things.”

While acknowledging caregiver burnout, Buchanan emphasised that families also have a responsibility to equip themselves with the tools needed to provide care.

“A mental-health condition is like any other illness – diabetes, hypertension. It comes down to how we manage it,” she said.

At the same time, she noted that the large number of social cases places enormous strain on Bellevue’s limited resources.

Once an 800-bed institution, the 164-year-old hospital now operates at a 500-bed capacity due to longstanding infrastructure challenges.

“Just imagine, we have 500 bed space, but 400 are social cases – they only leave here when they die,” she said. “It costs us about $20 million per month to take care [of them]. ... That’s the same money we ... [need] to fix the place, but what do you do? They have to take medication, they have to eat, so we have to choose to feed them.”

Though support has come from the National Health Fund, corporate Jamaica and, more recently, increased dialogue with the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, the hospital still faces urgent repair needs.

“We really need some wards to be repaired. We have severe leakage sometimes. They are clean, but there is the need for some upgrade,” she said. “We’ve had two hurricanes in recent years, and we’ve been rocked - the brick is strong, but the roofs are a little bit compromised at this point.”

The occupancy crisis also affects the hospital’s ability to accept referrals from other psychiatric units despite having the largest pool of mental-health professionals in the country.

This Christmas, Buchanan is also renewing her call for greater mental-health destigmatisation.

“When you think of someone that is living with a mental-health condition, what comes to mind is somebody torn, tattered, and throwing stones and using profanities – violence. That is [not the reality]. You have persons living with mental-health conditions, but it is controlled.”

“We have a farm here [at Bellevue]. They go out and they farm; they have activities that they do. They live very normal lives. We have former business owners here, we have accountants here, we have all of these individuals,” she stated.

sashana.small@gleanerjm.com