NAMELESS, penniless and without an address - more and more of such patients are being left behind in the Penang Hospital. They can't go home when they have recovered, old folks' homes are full and can't take them while the hospital needs the beds for the sick.

Curled up in a foetal position on his hospital bed, a patient, whose name is listed as 'unknown' in the hospital file, does nothing but stare blankly at the walls around him all day long.

This has been his position from the time he was brought to the hospital in an ambulance after he was found on the roadside by passers-by who called the hospital.

It has been almost a month since the 60-year-old landed at the Penang Hospital with leg injuries and other complications caused by uncontrolled diabetes and tuberculosis.

His treatment is now over and doctors are ready to discharge him but he does not have anywhere to go nor does he remember anything.

And the most difficult part both for him and the hospital is that none of his family members has come to take him home.

'His condition was considered to be bad when he was brought here. Besides the leg injuries, he was also suffering from a type of skin disease which caused the skin on both his legs to peel,' said Ms Lim Bee Ean, head of the hospital's Medical Social Services Department in an interview recently.

'He is conscious and although he can now speak, we don't know where to send him as he can't remember his address and no one has come looking for him. But he has told hospital staff that he has children.'

Nameless, penniless and without an address, the patient is among those who are brought to the hospital, courtesy of the police or passers-by, and receive treatment and care from social workers.

'While these patients, whom we identify as those with placement problems, fight their own battle to get well, the hospital faces a different set of problems as it tries to attend to an average of 10 such patients each month,' said Ms Lim.

'Most of these patients are vagabonds, beggars or those rejected by society. They have either been knocked down or brought here by passers-by.

'Then there are those who are abandoned by their children and cannot remember anything like their house address or how many children they have.

'The majority of such patients we get at the hospital have no identity card on them, making it more difficult for us to trace their families.'

She added that Penang was a popular place with beggars and vagabonds from nearby states such as Perlis and Kedah, especially during public holidays.

'Sometimes they fall sick or get involved in an accident while they are here and end up being stuck at the hospital,' she said.

Once the patients with placement problems get well, the doctors refer them to the department to get help to trace their families, she said.

'This is when the situation becomes a bit messy for us at the department because without a proper history of the patient, it takes some time for us to put up notices about the patient in newspapers or on the hospital's notice board.

'There have been instances where family members have come to collect the patients after seeing the notices in the newspapers, although this is not very often,' she said.

Ms Lim added that the department was under pressure to trace the patients' families as soon as possible as the hospital faced a shortage of beds.

'The Penang Hospital is just a referral hospital but we have cases where sometimes the children, especially those who cannot afford to go to the private hospitals, dump their aged and invalid parents or in-laws in the third class wards,' she said.

Ms Lim said the department also has a hard time trying to secure a place for these patients at old folks homes as the homes are full most of the time. She she liaises with the state welfare department?s liaison officer every two or three weeks to try to place the patients in any of the homes.

'Sometimes, I have to be nasty with the doctors and ask them how they expect me to solve the problem in a day when a patient has been lying homeless on the streets for the past two years,' she said.

'However, at times the doctors are also co-operative and understanding and they try to help by sending some of these patients to the less active hospitals in the other districts.'

Ms Lim, who was a staff nurse before becoming a social worker in 1983, said that based on her 25 years of experience, she noticed that such problems are more rampant in urban areas.

'In the past, the problem was more evident among the Chinese and Indians but these days, we also have Malay patients who have been abandoned by their children and end up on the streets,' she said.

With more than enough on her plate, Ms Lim also has to solve placement problems for patients who are foreign workers, mostly illegal, and patients with psychiatric problems.

Then, there are the cases whom Ms Lim refers to as the 'regulars' who run away from welfare homes and end up on the streets before finally landing up again in the hospital.

'For the foreigners, I usually contact the Immigration Department to help us and these foreign patients are deported. However, I face some problems with psychiatric patients as I simply cannot afford to keep them here for a long period of time,' she said.

She hopes that in time to come, there would be some kind of inter-agency collaboration between the related government agencies to help those with psychiatric problems.

'During a visit to Germany, I found out that the local factories there employ a certain percentage of psychiatric patients who are able to perform simple tasks so that they do not become a burden to society,' she said.

Ms Lim, who has served as a social worker in Malacca and Ipoh before, said the non-governmental organisations could help patients with placement problems by setting up a transit home where patients could stay and re-adapt before being sent to welfare homes or return to society.

She vividly recalled one case which she had handled in Penang involving a trishaw puller who was suffering from depression. He wanted to commit suicide by trying to jump from Komtar not once, but twice.

He was admitted and that's when I had the chance to talk to him and help him by getting him into a welfare home. I visited him once at the home and he was very thankful for what I had done for him.

'For me, it was just one of the many cases I had handled but it was certainly a very meaningful one because although the thank you was just a simple gesture from the trishaw puller, it reminded me of the day I had helped a man find a 'home'.' -- The Star/ANN