Several wards emptied at Abbasseya Psychiatric Hospital in move staff say heralds contested relocation

The management of Abbasseya Psychiatric Hospital closed down several departments and suspended some of the hospital’s services in September — a move that a group of the hospital’s staff dubbed a prequel to contested plans to relocate the public hospital out to Badr City in a Tuesday statement.

The management of Egypt’s second-largest psychiatric hospital started earlier this month to move patients out of several wards and close down outpatient rehabilitation facilities, a 104-bed inpatient department, the electroconvulsive therapy unit, electroencephalography facilities, the doctors' lounge, and two other departments which were specialized for women and men. The management claimed the closures were temporary and necessary measures to allow for maintenance work that the Abbasseya Psychiatric Hospital Defense Front, an advocacy group comprising the hospital’s staff, says is yet to take place. 

The public psychiatric hospital’s prime location on the intersection of Ramses and Salah Salem Streets has provided easy and affordable access to mental health patients since its establishment in 1883, while the new potential location is some 55 km away from central Cairo in the predominantly industrial Badr City. Abbasseya Psychiatric Hospital currently sits downtown, an area that has become an attractive site for investment with real estate prices skyrocketing, fueling several moves from the government to commercialize the land over the past decade.

Ahmed Hussein, a doctor and the advocacy group’s coordinator, told Mada Masr that plans for maintenance work go back to September 2019, when it was recommended by the Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams University which prepared a status report and suggested renovations. In May 2021, another technical committee prepared a report on the necessary maintenance work. Though the building was vacated four months later, the planned maintenance was never carried out. 

Hussein described the delays as inaction on part of hospital administrators that worsened the condition of mental health facilities that were already deteriorating and risked the wellbeing of patients. That parts of the hospital have been vacated now signals that administrators are moving on with a plan to lease the hospital’s land and relocate it to new headquarters in Badr City, Hussein told Mada Masr.

In August, hospital administrators and the Health Ministry’s General Secretariat of Mental Health called upon a sovereign body — precisely which was not specified — to lease a plot of land from the hospital for a 20-year period in order to set up commercial stores, Hussein had told Mada Masr at the time. The plot of land to be offered was previously designated for the establishment of another hospital to treat mental disorders in children and addiction in adolescents, according to Hussein, who noted that the hospital spent LE1.8 million (nearly USD$115,000) on technical studies for the project before it was halted since the consulting office was unable to obtain a building permit.

Plans to transfer Abbasseya Pyschiatric Hospital out to new premises in Badr City surfaced for the first time in 2010. Psychiatrists and hospital staff organized a protest sit-in in front of the hospital at the time to demand a clear response from the Health Ministry and urge the government to renovate the hospital instead.

Although the ministry never responded, according to Hussein, steps toward facilitating the transfer were halted for nine years. News of the hospital once again hit the headlines in January 2019, when the Cabinet refuted allegations that the hospital was to be demolished and its land exploited for investment. The Health Ministry said, in the same month, that land in Badr City was earmarked for another psychiatric facility that would operate in parallel to the hospital in Abbasiya. 

Despite the ministry’s assurances, the hospital’s defense front obtained documents prepared by the Housing Ministry that referred to the “allocation of plots of land in Badr City to establish a mental health complex as a substitute to Abbasseye Hospital.”

Earlier this year, news about the commercialization of the hospital land once again stirred opposition on the part of hospital staffers, who criticized the move through the defense front, asserting that it would constitute  a “waste of hospital land” and a “violation of patient rights” as set out in the hospital’s bylaws, which stipulate that commercial projects should be undertaken only in the interests of patients.