Sultan Bahu Centre noticed an immediate need in the community to help rehabilitate substance dependant persons. This has an immediate benefit on society as a whole, but more specifically has an uplifting and healing effect on the person and their family.

Our drug rehabilitation centres are strongly aligned to a holistic approach to care for patients. At the end of 7-weeks of outpatient treatment, our aim is to have a person who is drug free and who has a sense of responsibility which will enable them to maintain sustained and gainful employment and be in the position to give back to society. We currently run four of these centres in Cape Town.

The rehabilitation process is supervised and falls under the auspices of professional mental health care professionals, medical staff and other necessary specialists. The cost of rehabilitating a single patient who is committed to changing their lives is substantial, but the benefits of the treatment have a positive filter down effect on our whole society.

The treatment programme is an all-inclusive and encourages positive social activity outlets such as sport, spiritual upliftment and constructive engagement. Through this programme, recovering substance dependent can enter into society anew, and can positively contribute towards the community.

The counselling offered is holistic and includes the recovering patient’s families in order to not only heal the person, but to bring families together again after they have been torn apart by the scourge of drugs.

Our drug rehabilitation centres currently service nearly half of all the patients in the Western Cape in need of urgent intervention and treatment against opiate addiction and we were recently featured in a Sunday Times article on the dire situation in the Western Cape. Sultan Bahu Centre’s drug rehabilitation centre adheres to the highest internationally recognised norms and standards for out-patient care as set out by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs.

It is with this in mind that we try to use our resources to benefit society, because we believe that it is only through healing a heart and  making a difference in each individual’s life that society can grow and improve. We hope that in concentrating our efforts on improving society and family life that our efforts in drug rehabilitation will have a positive impact on entire communities. We are thankful that our programme has amongst the highest success rates in the country and this will continue to have a positive impact on the Western Cape.

Over the last decade that our rehabilitation programme has been active, we have screened over 15 000 people, and had over 5000 people admitted to our programme. Our programme has a very high success rate of over 80% of people remaining sober after having completed our treatment course.