Ministers may order a public inquiry into mental health care and patient deaths in England due to the number of scandals that are emerging related to poor treatment.
Maria Caulfield, the mental health minister, told MPs on Thursday that she and health secretary Steve Barclay were considering launching an investigation because the same glitches were happening so often in so many different parts of the country.
They would make a final decision “in the next few days”, he said in the House of Commons, responding to an urgent question put forward by his Labor shadow, Dr. Rosena Allin-Khan.
An independent investigation found this week that three teenagers – Christie Harnett, 17, Nadia Sharif, 17, and Emily Moore, 18 – took their own lives in the space of eight months after receiving inadequate care from the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS (TEWV) mental health trust in northeast England.
They died after “multifaceted and systemic failures” by the trust, especially at its West Lane hospital in Middlesbrough, the inquest found.
Allin-Khan pointed to a number of scandals that have come to light, often through media investigations, about dangerously substandard mental health care being provided by NHS services and also private companies in England, including in Essex Y in Greater Manchester.
“Patients are dying, being bullied, dehumanized, abused, and their medical records are being falsified, an outrageous breach of patient safety,” Allin-Khan said. “The government has failed to learn from the mistakes of the past.”
Caulfield acknowledged that the failures at TEWV were not unique and that other recent scandals meant that ministers and the National Health Service I urgently needed to know how deeply ingrained poor care was.
“I am not satisfied that the failures we have heard about today are necessarily isolated incidents in a handful of trusts,” she said. Caulfield said she would meet Claire Murdoch, the NHS England’s clinical director of mental health, and Dr. Henrietta Hughes, the newly appointed patient safety commissioner, imminently to help agree what to do.
NHS England had recently instigated a “system-wide investigation into the safety and quality of [mental health] services in all areas”, especially mental health services for children and adolescents, said the minister.
Caulfield told MPs: “On the subject of a public inquiry, I am not necessarily saying that there will not be a public inquiry, but it must be at a national level and not just on the basis of individual trust because, as we have seen in [scandals involving NHS] maternity [care]very often when we repeat these queries they produce the same information and we need to systematically learn how to reduce these failures.”
He added: “The problem I have with a public investigation is that they are not timely, they can take many years, and clearly we have some cases now that need urgent review and urgent action.”
Ministers can commission a “rapid review” rather than a public inquiry, in order to produce evidence and recommendations for action more quickly, Caulfield added.
Deborah Coles, director of Inquest, a charity that helps families of people who have died while receiving NHS mental health care, said the government should order a “full and fearless” public inquiry as a matter of urgency as a prelude to order radical changes. .
“Bereaved families are very familiar with hearing about new reviews or research. Previous critical inquiries, inspections and investigations of mental health services have failed to drive the transformation in culture and leadership that is needed,” he said.
“It is our view, and the view of many of the bereaved families we work with, that a national legal inquiry should be established to facilitate a full and fearless examination of the problems in mental health services that are leading to neglect, abuse and death. Nothing less will suffice.”
