The Mental Health Care Act: Stakeholder compliance with Section 40 of the Act
Abstract
Objective. To determine compliance with Section 40 (1-3) of
the Mental Health Care Act (MHCA) No 17 of 2002, viz. handing over custody by the South African Police Service (SAPS) of suspected mentally ill patients to medical services at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital (CHBH).
Methods. The study was a retrospective record review of patients who were 18 years and older, referred by SAPS to CHBH. In accordance with Section 40 of the MHCA, a MHCA form 22 is completed when suspected mentally ill patients are handed over by SAPS to the medical services. MHCA forms 22 that were completed during the period
July 2007 to December 2007 were obtained from hospital
records and analysed to determine the compliance of SAPS and medical practitioners in completing them.
Results. During the study period, 708 of the 718 patients handed over by SAPS to the Emergency Department of CHBH were entered on MHCA forms 22. SAPS officials had correctly completed 86% of the forms, whereas the medical practitioners had only correctly completed 9.9% of the forms. Of the 718 patients handed over by SAPS, 319 (44%) were discharged for outpatient care.
Conclusion. The findings of this study suggest that not all
parties fully comply with Section 40 of the Mental Health Care
Act No 17 of 2002. We suggest that the situation can be improved by training of all parties; amendments to the MHCA form 22; partnership between mental health care practitioners and members of SAPS; and combining resources towards implementing a crisis intervention model similar to that in other countries.
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.