Report Raises Concerns About Standard of Mental Health Care

By Anonymous

The Mental Health Act Commission (MHAC) have recently published In Place of Fear?, their eleventh biennial report based on visits to detained psychiatric patients in all hospitals in England and Wales between 2003 and 2005.

While welcoming the government’s decision to focus on in-patient services, the commission said that more needed to be done to tackle the fear that people have of mental health services.

The report also raised some worrying issues within mental health services, primarily the inability of some in-patient mental health services to provide patients with acceptable levels of security and care.

Other concerns raised by the MHAC’s observations included a fall in staffing levels compounded by a shortage of beds, which they warn is not conducive to the treatment and recovery of in-patients. They found that over half of all wards were full or had more patients than beds.

There is also a risk to specialist service provision due to the devolution of service commissioning to PCTs and the general financial crises within NHS trusts.

With a decrease in the number of prison transfers to hospital, and a fall in the rate of diversion of the mentally disordered from custody, the report has called for reform of the concepts of criminal responsibility and a review of the role of the Home Office in taking decisions about the care of mentally disordered offenders.

Chris Heginbotham, chief executive of the MHAC, said: The report highlights a number of commission concerns about mental health care. Mental Health Act Commissioners find serious abuses of the rights of patients every week – which in 2006 is simply inexcusable. We are especially worried about complacent and often lax use of the Mental Health Act; some provider attributes demonstrate a lack of understanding I of the significance of depriving a person of their liberty.

‘We are particularly concerned about the way the criminal justice system works to the detriment of mentally disordered people (especially in relation to Black people, as we saw from the recent Census results) and call on the government to review the Home Office role in decisions about mentally disordered offenders.’

Copyright Community Psychiatric Nurses Association Mar 2006