Mental health patients have been forced to flush toilets with buckets and are being offered portable camping showers amid a water outage at Princess Margaret Hospital in Christchurch.
The situation has disgusted mental health advocates who say it’s something you’d expect in a third world country.
The hospital provides services for highly vulnerable people, including children suffering from psychotic episodes, and treatment for eating disorders.
Emails obtained by 1News show staff were instructed to bring their own drinking water to work this week due to planned repairs to a leaking pipe.
They were provided with portaloos and “flusher buckets” for toilets to be filled with fire hoses on site.
Some of the 38 patients were advised to go home for showers, while others were given wet wipes and access to “solar” showers more typically used in camping.
"If anyone needs to shower on the ward there are camp solar showers in my office," one email reads.
"These need to be left in the sun for up to 3 hours to warm which may not be realistic so I think the easiest way to utilise these would be fill them with cold water and mix in hot water from the kettle."
The news shocked Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson.
“I just think it's absolutely disgusting, and it makes me very angry,” he said.
"Myself and many people working in mental health are just getting completely fed up with the lack of progress, with the decades of neglect for mental health that has led to this kind of appalling situation."
The health agency Te Whatu Ora issued an apology this afternoon and put the issue down to the age of the building.
The general manager of specialist mental health services, Greg Hamilton, acknowledged the outage was having a “terrible impact” on patients and thanked his staff for persevering in the circumstances.
He said a new state-of-the-art facility was being built nearby at the Hillmorton Hospital to care for all of Princess Margaret’s in-patients.
“It's frustrating but we've got infrastructure that's old,” he said.
“We don't have an alternative. There's nowhere where we can put people in the meantime that's both safe, and safe for our staff, so we’re stuck there until this is finished.”
The new project and was a significant build with an outlay of nearly $80 million.
"We're expecting [it to be finished by] Quarter 2 next year, so practical completion around April and then there will be some final stages," he said.
"The environment is one of a warm, homely feeling, lots of light, plenty of wood – the things that we know that help people relax and concentrate with their recovery and get better."
However, Robinson said the water outage was something you would expect to see in a developing country.
"While I can't blame people who are forced to play catch up because they didn't get the funding and resources to develop services, I can't stop being absolutely furious that our young people should be facing these kinds of conditions," he said.
All governments had to take blame as these kinds of situations don’t "occur overnight", he added.
"You can't wave a magic wand and create a new building which should have been planned probably 15 years ago," he said.
"It's symptomatic of the systemic neglect of mental health that has gone on for so long."
The water is being turned back on tonight, ending what is already the third outage this year.
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