Ill-treatment at hospital alleged

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32838, 11 February 1972, Page 9

Ill-treatment at hospital alleged

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyrights LONDON, Feb. 10. A British medical newspaper today revealed details of “irregularities” at a northern England mental hospital, which include ill-treat-ment of patients and patients’ money “not easily accounted for,” the Press Association reported.

The details are included in a report in the doctors’ newspaper “Pulse,” which purports to be an exclusive account of a recently-completed official inquiry into conditions at Preston Whittingham Hospital in Lancashire.

Copies of the newspaper which has a controlled circulation to 35,000 British general practitioners and hospital doctors and is not for sate to the public were made available to the press. “Pulse” says that among the inquiry’s findings are: “One consultant treating 625-long-stay mental patients during one session a week; many nurses without formal training; a sister spending 47 years on one ward; financial irregularities in which £49,000 of patient’s money during one year was ‘not easily accounted for’.” The official report of the inquiry is due to be published as a command paper by the

British Government next Tuesday.

The newspaper said that the committee found there was little rehabilitation of patients, an inadequate regional board policy tending to create “long stay dumps." and suppression of criticism. “When nursing staff alleged serious ill-treatment and fraud, the committee accepts that they were threatened with actions for libel and slander. A subsequent internal inquiry into the allegations ‘ran into the sand’,” it says. The committee was set up by the Secretary of State for Social Services in February, 1971, under Sir Robert Payne, the “Pulse" report says. The inquiry says that the standard of care for many of the 2250 patients in the hospital was sometimes “almost beyond belief.” The report alleges that violent patients were “restrained by having a wet towel twisted around their necks until they lost consciousness.”

Other allegations include patients being locked in a small room under some stairs and often locked out of doors, ill-clad and regardless of the weather, the report says.

“Pulse” says that the inquiry found that many of the enrolled nurses had never received any formal course of training. Much of the domestic work of the hospital was done by nurses, it added.