Patient who absconded UHG psychiatric unit found three miles away

A psychiatric patient was found wandering around Menlo in a disoriented state after absconding from the psychiatric unit of University Hospital Galway at the weekend.

The shoeless man wearing blue pyjamas was spotted last Saturday night by a resident who called Gardaí – they had been on the lookout for him after being alerted of his disappearance by hospital staff. “He was very lucky that he wasn’t knocked down,” the resident said.

Separately, the daughter of an in-patient at the psychiatric unit this week claims her mother has ‘got out’ of the secure unit on several occasions.

“I rang the hospital to ask where my mother was. They said she was outside in the garden smoking. I said ‘she isn’t, she’s outside the front door of my house – in Oranmore’. She was after getting out past the nurses and driving to my home,” she explained.

The 52-year-old mother is depressed and suffers from manic bipolar. During ‘high’ episodes, she has absconded from the psychiatric unit, even though considered ‘high risk’.

“It’s happened a few times. There was one time when she got out of the unit and she was in the car park of the hospital joyriding in her friend’s car – she could have killed herself and killed other people and they would have been responsible because she was supposed to be in the care of the hospital . . . You think your family member is safe going in there – to be honest with you, nobody is safe in there in my opinion.”

She said patients regularly abscond from the unit and offered recommendations for the hospital to make it more secure.

“There needs to be more nurses and they need to be watching out more. Obviously there aren’t enough of them and they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing if people are getting out past the nurses’ watch,” she said.

Meanwhile, tragedy was averted when a disoriented man was found wandering in Menlo, around three miles from the hospital at about 10pm on Saturday.

Gardaí were alerted by a resident and were on the scene almost immediately to bring him back to the psychiatric unit.

For more on the abscondment of patients from UHG’s psychiatric unit, see this week’s Galway City Tribune