Written evidence to be reported to the House
Health and Social Care Bill
11:15 am
Lord Kamlesh Patel: If I start, Chris can contribute as well. You asked specifically, “What changes to the Bill?”, so I will focus on tightening the Bill rather than on some of the process issues that we are concerned about. In theory, we are lifting the whole of the Mental Health Act Commission’s legal duties under the Mental Health Act and transferring them under this Bill. People should be saying, “What is the problem, when all of the legislative protection that you had is moving into here?” I suppose the difference is that we are an organisation focused on one client group. Our sole priority is detained patients.
All our resources and thinking are on the safeguarding of those patients, so we interpret that legislation in a particular way to ensure that they have full protection—that is, mainly, by our visiting programme. The fear is that we will get lost in a larger organisation. If there is a health scare of some kind, then you might stop visiting. I will give you some examples from what we see on a day-to-day basis; I keep talking about the evidence, and I am not sure whether you have the evidence that we have presented to the Committee.
When going into a ward, since this is not a bureaucratic process and there are no teams of us going into organisations to demand lots of paperwork and staff time, an individual simply goes in based on our understanding of the ward or unit and interviews detained patients. Lots of the issues arise when interviewing those detained patients who do not want to see us. At our conference last month, I gave 100 commissioners two minutes to give me just one thing that they had seen that had disturbed them within the previous months. Examples were given of a male member of staff using his mobile phone to photograph a naked woman patient in the bath; of allowing a disability patient to be restrained, and his arm broken with two fractures; of a patient who was HIV-positive having his razor used by other patients on the ward; of over-occupancy by 100 per cent. in something like 40 per cent. of London hospital wards; and of cockroach and mice infestation throughout. In two minutes, over 100 such examples were given of what happened in the last six months of 2007. Only by visiting these places can we address these issues.
The point, which I am getting to, is that we need something in legislation to ensure that that visiting process does not change and is safeguarded. I know how difficult it is to stipulate in legislation that you will visit A, B and C, but we need to tighten that process. Do you want to add to that before I go on to the other points?