Mumbai: Nine months after a dedicated psychiatry ward was inaugurated at the state-run St George’s Hospital near CST, female patients are still unable to get admitted here because the hospital has not appointed a female night attendant, a requirement for admitting female patients.A 20-bedded male psychiatry ward has been functional since Sept 2025, with mostly patients with addiction problems admitted here. The female enclosure of 10 beds, however, has a lock.St George’s Hospital set up a psychiatry unit under Dr Sarika Dakshikar last year. However, teething problems continue. The department’s outpatient clinic, for instance, is shared with the Chest/TB department. In a letter written to senior govt officials and ministers in April, Dr Yusuf Matcheswalla, the hospital’s honorary professor of psychiatry, flagged both issues.“Without minimal female attendants, we cannot ensure safe and culturally appropriate inpatient care for women, who constitute a significant proportion of our psychiatric caseload,” wrote Dr Matcheswalla.His main concern with the OPD is that many psychiatric patients are “already vulnerable because of severe mental illness, co-morbid medical conditions and compromised immunity”. His letter states that the shared OPD with TB patients is both “clinically and ethically unacceptable”.Dr Matcheswalla told TOI that he has donated an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) machine to the hospital, but it is not in use because the hospital has not appointed an anaesthetist required for the ECT procedure. ECT is, at times, used to rapidly relieve severe mental illnesses when medications and psychotherapy are ineffective.The hospital authorities, however, insisted that each of the issues is being fixed. “We have already carried out recruitment of Class IV staff and they should be joining within a month. Female ayahs will be available for night duty thereafter,” said St George’s Hospital medical superintendent Dr Vinay Sawardekar.The British-era hospital faces a space crunch, especially as new equipment and specialities are being added. In the ongoing renovation work at the hospital, an OPD space has been created near the MRI machine. “This space will be utilised for Chest TB OPD at the earliest,” said Dr Sawardekar.Dr Matcheswalla said that psychiatry departments in the other state govt-run hospitals are also facing problems. “GT Hospital, another major public psychiatric centre, lacks ECT, while JJ Hospital’s male psychiatry ward is currently under repair. Hence ECT availability in the city is limited,” he said, adding that the provision of ECT at St George’s Hospital would reduce the therapeutic gap for thousands of patients.
