A patient at St Brendan's Hospital in Dublin was transferred 37 times because of a shortage of beds, while other patients slept on mattresses on the floor, according to the 1996 report of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals.
The late publication of the report was condemned yesterday by Senator Mary Henry, who said it was now "a historical document". The report should be available with six months of the end of the year, she said.
The Minister for Health and Children, Mr Cowen, said it was important the inspector's reports be published in the year following inspection and said he would ensure the 1997 report was published "as soon as possible".
This is the ninth annual report issued by the inspector, Dr Dermot Walsh.
The report reveals patients in some hospitals had to share clothes. In St Ita's, Portrane, patients had to share "toilet requisites".
Senator Henry said these practices were "Dickensian" and that the sharing of toilet requisites was unhygienic and bad practice when there was so much concern about hepatitis and other infections.
She had been trying for years to have the practice ended in the Eastern Health Board area, but the issue came up year after year in the inspector's report, she said.
While the report is critical of some practices in St Brendan's and St Ita's, it found that there had been improvements.
The report complains some hospitals were reluctant to take back patients they had transferred to the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum although they had "clinically recovered".
Overall, the number of patients in psychiatric hospitals fell in 1996, from 5,284 at the start of the year to 5,047 by the year's end. Nearly four in 10 of these patients were aged over 65. The report is critical of the psychiatric service for the Kildare/ west Wicklow area, describing it as "seriously under-provided in its community aspects, lacking adequate day hospital, day centre and community residential facilities".
It says there had been significant improvements at St Joseph's, the mental handicap section of St Ita's Hospital.
"The comprehensive range of activities available to patients of the day services located on St Joseph's campus was very impressive," it says.
An exception was Unit K, where "the rooms were in poor decorative repair, no curtains were provided, patients did not have any privacy and the toilet facilities were not hygienic."