Mass resignation of staff from a psychiatric ward. Employees denounce “media abuse” following revelations about how patients are treated

The staff from the psychiatry departments of the “Dr. Gheorghe Marinescu” Municipal Hospital in Târnăveni resigned en masse, accusing the media of “abuse”, following the visit of representatives of the Legal Resources Center (CRJ) and the Council for Monitoring the Implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, who cited the existence of very serious irregularities regarding the conditions of patient care, informs Agerpres.

The reaction of the department's staff, claims the manager of the “Dr. Gheorghe Marinescu” Municipal Hospital in Târnăveni, Szuzanna Megheşan, came against the background of a public post by the CRJ representative, Georgiana Pascu, who claims that “improper accommodation conditions, lack of adequate hygiene, immobilized or isolated patients” were found.

“You probably heard about the resignations that were submitted on Sunday by the staff in the psychiatric departments, precisely because of these accusations of abuse brought by the respective ladies. However, we managed to have a dialogue, and the resignations are submitted with 20 days' notice for the execution staff and 45 days for the department heads. I also have a summary of the reasons behind the collective resignation. It is not that the staff are not doing their job, on the contrary, we all know that there are still problems everywhere. Indeed, the ladies have reported certain situations that they have observed on the surveillance cameras. In this sense, we consider it to be an abuse or at least an attempt to present the negative aspects of the work of the wards. psychiatry”, the manager of the Hospital, Szuzanna Megheşan, told the media on Wednesday.

People brought to psychiatry so they don't freeze to death on the street

The manager specified that the images presented would also raise questions regarding their legality.

“Patients and staff were recorded without their consent. The staff was outraged for this reason, because no one asked them for permission to be filmed or photographed, which is a violation of their rights, I am referring here to the provisions of the GDPR. Moreover, the ladies only showed the images that benefited them (…) If the state is 'unable' to provide the social assistance part, it is not our fault. The patients and staff have no fault that they are here. No one brought them with Yes, they are brought by the police or the ambulance, it is true, because we receive an order from the minister by which we are asked to take over these cases. It is normal that we do not let people freeze on the street. Once these people arrive at the hospital, where do we take them? There are no places in the social centers Târnăveni Hospital.

Szuzanna Megheşan stated that patients are not held captive so that the hospital receives money from the state

“The amounts received from the Insurance House are very small compared to the real expenses we have with each patient. No one talks about the good things we do: we take patients to the cinema, to monasteries, on trips, to restaurants, we organize shows (…) There are, indeed, many patients on a small area, but this is the existing infrastructure. We submitted a project to the Ministry of Health for the construction of a new building, so that we can move the medical and surgical wards and release the two large pavilions, central and neuropsychiatry. The goal is to relocate the psychiatric wards in better conditions”, said Szuzanna Megheşan.

Hospital management denies tying up patients

The manager of the Tarnăveni Hospital claimed that, two years ago, the CRJ team was in control and that “I would have liked to see, after that monitoring report, a legislative improvement, but nothing has changed”.

“We must understand that we are talking about mental patients. When someone says that they saw a patient undressed, they must know that there are patients who refuse to dress, tear their clothes, destroy everything, it is the nature of the disease. I have never tied them up. It was said that patients are held captive and tied up, which is completely untrue! In that video there is a patient who, in addition to mental illness, also has a serious neurological condition (a tumor cerebral) and, due to lack of balance, he was placed in a wheelchair and fixed with homologated, medically certified belts”, Szuzanna Megheşan also showed.

She said the Legal Resource Center filed a report with the police, who then checked the patients and found no signs of violence. The recordings from the video cameras were lifted.

CRJ's allegations

In a letter addressed to the Minister of Health, Alexandru Rogobete, posted on Facebook on Wednesday, Georgiana Pascu requested emergency intervention in support of the 261 patients admitted to the “Dr. Gheorghe Marinescu” Municipal Hospital in Târnăveni, Mureş county.

“For three days, starting on Friday, November 7, I visited unannounced the patients confined in the psychiatric wards of this hospital. I entered the psychiatric ward on Friday, around 6 o'clock in the morning. What I saw there is beyond any limit of human dignity: dozens of beds stuck together with people left on dirty mattresses or wrapped in plastic; a mess that is hard to describe; patients washing bodies of toilets in dirty bathrooms; bedclothes in tatters, with personal belongings under the pillow, most of them with bags hanging from the beds, which seemed to be endless – there are almost 100 people separated by glass walls people in agony who have been waiting there for decades for the Ministry of Health, together with the Ministry of Labor and the Mureş County Council, to take a measure to stop being captives in a healthcare system that, most likely, keeps them for pecuniary and material benefits”, Georgiana Pascu pointed out.

In the letter sent to the Minister of Health, it is even stated that in this hospital there have been “deaths due to the serious negligence of the staff and management of the hospital”, that it is about “25 patients who died there in less than 2 years”, plus a patient who hanged himself in the hospital yard.

“Medical staff and management told us that, despite overcrowded wards, understaffed, without training and without therapy activities according to the law, there would have been no cases of physical restraint for months, much less isolation. In reality, apart from the two physical restraints in September, the images viewed on Saturday and recorded on November 1 show how a patient is dragged and restrained in a salon. Although the CCTV system captures only a small area of the dining room, you can clearly see the whole process, carried out outside the legal framework”, Georgiana Pascu reported.

The CRJ representative also cited the discovery of undressed patients, left in the cold, the lack of hygiene products and the humiliation to which the patients are subjected, physical violence against the patients and lack of reporting, that there are no snacks between tables, the smoking terraces are cold and dirty and that the images show that the doctors are absent from the “real life of the wards”.