Article Sidebar
Published:
Sep 18, 2026Keywords:
Article Details
http://www.sajp.org.za/index.php/sajp/pages/view/policies#part_4
Copyright
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose.
AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
Profile of male acute admissions at a state psychiatric hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa
Anthea Payne Maziena
Muneeb Salie
Liezl Koen
Dana Niehaus
Petrus Steyn
Abstract
Background: Inpatient psychiatric services in South Africa are faced with challenges such as high demand for beds, rapid discharges, limited community services upon discharge and high readmission rates.
Aim: To provide a profile of the demographic and clinical characteristics of the mental health users of inpatient male acute psychiatric services.
Setting: The male acute unit at Stikland Hospital.
Methods: A retrospective folder review of all patients discharged (n = 693) from the male acute psychiatric unit at Stikland Hospital between 01 February 2022 and 31 January 2023, and followed up for 1 year post-discharge.
Results: Most of the admissions were young males (29 [23–35] years), single (89%) and unemployed (80.8%), with no secondary-level education (65.4%). Thirty per cent of admissions were admitted directly to the unit, and most patients presented with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (42.1%). Almost half (47.8%) of all admissions were patients previously admitted to Stikland Hospital, and more than one quarter (27.6%) were readmitted within 1 year following discharge. Most admissions had a short length of stay (36 [27–53] days) and were crisis-discharged (63.5%). The use of long-acting injectables (LAI) was highly prevalent (73.4%).
Conclusion: Current inpatient psychiatric services are functioning as crisis intervention units. The study provides a foundation for developing context-specific, tailored strategies to be integrated into the discharge planning processes within the existing healthcare system.
Contribution: Current system-related factors, such as bed shortages, lead to short length-of-stays (LOS) and crisis discharges, which likely contribute to a higher rate of readmissions.
