These reports were included in radical mental health magazine Asylum, Spring 2024
Community Care Under-funding Leaves People Trapped in Mental Health Units
In November, The Independent revealed analysis showing that over three thousand people were ‘stuck’ on mental health wards for more than three months last year, over three hundred of them children held in adult units. Many are well enough to leave but have not been released because they have nowhere to go.
The average stay for patients in low-security hospitals was recorded in 2022-23 as 833 days (around two-and-a-third years). The NHS does not collect data on how long people wait to be discharged.
Reports leaked to The Independent show the false economy in which NHS community services lack the resources to care for discharged patients, so the NHS is spending money keeping them in hospitals.
The newspaper found that people waited an average of three months to see a community mental health worker, but some were made to wait for more than a year. One-tenth of people who are under a community mental health team did not see a healthcare worker for a year.
Ben Craig, aged thirty-one, is one of the patients left stranded. He told the newspaper that he had been left “scarred” by being held on a ward for two years despite being fit enough to leave. The reason he was not discharged? Two councils were arguing over which was responsible for funding his supported accommodation.
The 3,213 patients stuck for more than three months was 639 more than the previous year before and is the highest figure ever.
An anonymous senior NHS source told The Independent that patients were becoming institutionalised, “medicated and drifting”, as long stays in mental health units had become “normalised”.
Four Die as Norfolk Mental Health Care Fails Again
Mental health care in Norfolk is once again under scrutiny following an apparent murder-suicide in which four people died in the South Norfolk town of Costessey.
Police believe that a man who had struggled with mental ill-health for about a year and had been a patient of the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) killed his two daughters and his sister-in-law before killing himself.
The NSFT, Norfolk police and Norfolk County Council all had contact with the family before their deaths.
Commentators are highlighting similarities between this case and the killing of three people in Nottingham by a man who has been sentenced to indefinite detention in a high-security hospital.
The Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) is holding a “serious incident review” into its dealings with the man to establish whether it missed any opportunities. However, with the Trust’s history of failure, campaigners will not be satisfied with it investigating itself, and are calling for an independent enquiry.
Kay Mason Billig, leader of the Conservative-controlled council, rejected calls for an independent enquiry, saying that “to blame somebody is not the right way forward.”
She also claimed that the Council could do nothing about the situation, saying that, “I’m very sad about what happened and I think we can learn lessons from it. but I don’t think we as a council can change how this is dealt with.”
The Trust has been placed in special measures by the care regulator four times since it was formed in 2012, demonstrating both how poor it has been and how ineffective ‘special measures’ have been in improving it.
Over five thousand people in Norfolk and Waveney have been waiting longer than eighteen weeks for mental health services, and a recent report found more than eight thousand “unexpected” deaths of the Trust’s patients in the past three years alone.
Labour MP for Norwich South, Clive Lewis, described local provision as “the worst mental health services in the country. Too few staff, too few beds, too many people not getting the care they need, and too many dying.”
