More hospital ill-treatment

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32845, 19 February 1972, Page 17

More hospital ill-treatment

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) LONDON, February 17. A report this week on the ill-treatment of patients and mismanagement of a Lancashire mental hospital comes at a time when the British medical profession is debating the worth of Government policy to get rid of such hospitals.

The report on Whittingham Hospital is the third in the last three vears to uncover scandalous conditions in some of Britain’s antiquated mental hospitals. An inquiry into Ely Hospital in 1970 reported illtreatment of patients, pilfering and lax standards of nursing and last vear. after three nurses were convicted of cruelty to patients, another committee reported ineffective medical supervision and conditions productive of violence among patients at Fairleigh Hospital. Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary of State for Social Services, who commissioned the Whittingham inquiry has accepted its recommendations that all members of the hospital’s management committee should be invited to resign for allowing such conditions to exist. The chairman and four members of the committee have resigned already.

The ill-treatment discovered in Whittingham was limited to four long-stay wards and included: staff restraining a patient by twisting a wet towel round his neck until he became unconscious. setting fire to a patient’s clothing with methylated spirits, serving bread and jam for breakfast and tea whatever file menu, mixing up food and serving it as slops and leaving patients untreated and without adequate occupation.

The report says the regional hospital board governing Whittingham must take a share of the blame for not adequately recognising the needs of elderlv long-stav patients. A dual standard for these and shorter-term patients should not be allowed to arise.

The uncertain future of hospitals like Whittingham was part of the trouble, ac-

cording to the report. It was not enough to say that with the opening of district hospital units to take psychiatric patients these old mental hospitals would close in 10 years to 15 years.

Without alternative provision for long-stav and elderlv patients their closing would remain a paper dream and would perpetuate a dual standard system, of one kind of treatment in mental hospitals and another in psvchiatric units.

Sir Keith Joseph’s plan, announced six weeks ago to close the 116 large, separate mental hospitals in England and Wales and replace these with 230 psychiatric units in district hospitals has met other criticism on this point, from the medical profession. Dr David Ennals, a former minister of state at the Health Department with the Labour Government is unhapov about the proposals. “Sir Keith holds out a rosy prospect of closing all the old mental hospitals without saving what is to happen to the long-stav natients who represent two-thirds of the hospital population, more than 50,000 of them over 65,” he said earlier this month.

Dr Ennals has pressed Sir Keith Joseph to publish a Government White Paper on

the problem of the mentally ill to avoid a serious slump in the “morale of our already hard-pressed mental hospitals.” “At present,” he said, "administrators, doctors, nurses and social workers at work in the psychiatric services are in a state of acute uncertainty, confusion and in some cases dismay.” A Government White Paper on policy for the mentally handicapped published in July had said what was expected of local authorities and hospitals in the next years, he said. Becatise of this many local authorities and hospitals were now planning a capital programme to meet targets for the care of the mentally handicapped. “Yet Sir Keith stubbornly refuses to propose and publish a similar document for the much bigger problem of the mentally ill,” he said. The British Medical Journal, though welcoming Sir Keith Joseph’s plan to replace the old hospitals with units in general hospitals and local authority facilities, said that it could only do a disservice if it encouraged any hospitals to discharge patients too early to social services “which are overloaded and creaking or which exist only on paper.”