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The Minister of Health, Dr. Benjamin Kumbour, has directed that a ministerial Committee of Inquiry be set up to delve deep into alleged inhuman acts and human rights violation of inmates at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital in Asylum Down, Accra. During an official visit to the Hospital to acquaint himself with their operations, the Health Minister stressed the �need to get to the bottom of the matter on what exactly was happening.� �I must also admit that what we are seeing and witnessing here today is a tip of the iceberg of the extent of institutional care failures that we have in our health delivery system,� he stated. Dr Benjamin Kumbour added that, he expected to find similar situations in non-mental health facilities in terms of the infrastructure, the administrative weaknesses and the failures that are there. He said the Ministry was going to �put in place whatever it takes to make sure there is not a re-occurrence.� He stressed that government will channel the criminal aspect of the findings to the appropriate quarters for immediate redress. Dr. Kumbour charged that it was time patients undergoing psychiatric evaluation are treated as people entitled to fundamental human rights and not treated like animals. However, he said for issues concerning security, there was going to be an immediate response both in the short and long-term for it to be addressed. �I want to see the administration send me some outline in terms of the immediate things that need to be done in a matter of days not beyond 1 week for us to make the intervention�I will also want to register that the ethical issues that are highly unacceptable, I would want a proposal based on your guidelines in your ethics of work on what the appropriate sanctions will be where we will find out some staff are culpable,� he said. Mrs Alice Asare Allotey, Deputy Director of Nursing Services at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, admitted that the situation at the hospital bordered on the issues of ethical and administrative lapses. She said that the hospital was bedevilled with the issue of staff constraints owing to the fact that many medical professionals were refusing postings to the mental health hospitals based on the segregation and stigmatization society associated with mental health facilities. "Currently there are about 1,200 patients in the hospital and there are only 280 nurses who need to render a 24-hour service to the inmates," Mrs Allotey said. She said that some of the nurses were presently on leave with a few of them currently at post who even suffered physical brutalities meted out to them by the mentally-challenged inmates. "There is no motivation for the staff. Many of our family members and society have neglected us because of the stigma they attach to psychiatry." She called on the public to embrace the rehabilitated mentally-challenged patients in order to accept them back to their families. "About half of the 1,200 patients at the hospital are those who have been declared mentally sound and discharged. Ideally, these should be with their families, but the difficulty is that they return to the hospital because family members have neglected them." Ace investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, posed as a mental patient to unravel the terrible practices at Ghana�s leading Psychiatric treatment centre. According to him, the Accra Psychiatric Hospital is hemorrhaging from serious administrative, operational and ethical lapses that have seen patients living in subhuman and monstrous conditions. Anas� investigations uncovered that at the Accra Psychiatric hospital, patients are subjected to extreme physical abuse and neglect. Staff buys cocaine and cannabis for patients while stealing food meant for them to sell on the open market.