Bodies of 19 psych patients remain unclaimed as police struggle to find families

Police are encountering unexpected obstacles to their efforts to identify 19 bodies believed to be of psychiatric patients who died after being transferred from Life Esidimeni centres to various NGOs in Gauteng.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said on Tuesday that the bodies had come from NGOs but remained unidentified months later.

He was speaking at a press conference on how his department was implementing recommendations made by health ombudsman Malegapuru Makgoba following the death of 94 mentally ill patients.

Makgoba found that NGOs to which the patients were transferred were unlicenced and many were ill-equipped to care for the mentally ill. The 19 unidentified bodies are not included in the initial tally of 94 dead.

In one case of an unidentified body‚ fingerprints linked the body to a family but when police visited the family‚ they denied knowing the person. The family would not be give the police DNA samples to help identify the body‚ Motsoaledi said.

Motsoaledi said he hoped families would have come forward by now given the huge media attention given to the Life Esidimeni saga.

But he admitted that "all over the world families abandon mentally ill patients".

• READ MORE: All NGOs implicated in deadly mental health disaster to be shut down: Health MinisterAbout 700 patients who were removed from Life Esidmeni healthcare centres and put into NGOs will be moved back to healthcare centres‚ with some likely to return to one of the Life Esidimeni centres in Germiston‚ Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has said.

"At some stage a decision might have to be taken by the police to bury the bodies in line with the law‚" he said. The Department of Health and medical experts are working to find the right institutions to house about 700 patients who remain at NGOs.

Motsoaledi said all NGOs will be shut down as recommended by health ombudsman Makgoba but the department would not rush to move patients out of NGOs‚ to avoid a repeat of chaos that lead to patient deaths. Makgoba has given the health department 45 days to apply his recommendations.

Following assessment by health department staff‚ seven NGOs have already been closed.

The experts have also assessed other facilities to take the patients.

Life Healthcare said one of its Esidimeni facilities can take 75 patients in the next week and would need eight weeks to get ready to take more.

The team has also looked at an empty facility in Selby‚ Johannesburg that was once used for rehabilitation of surgical patients from Gauteng hospitals.

- TMG Digital