This can be blamed in part on the Government's state of mind We have become accustomed to low standards in mental health that would be regarded as unacceptable in other specialties.It is time to draw a line and demand the same priority for mental health that is given to cancer and heart disease It is not much to ask. But those who suffer from mental illness are still not getting it.. When health authority budgets are divided up, it is the cancer kings and the surgical knights who get the lion's share.This can be blamed, in part, on the Government's state of mind. But instead of building up community services, the capital's health services continue to use high numbers of hospital beds to contain patients. Twice as many people are sectioned in London as in any other region, and occupancy rates on hospital wards have risen to 97 per cent.Doctors have claimed for years that the extra cash allocated to mental health was not finding its way to the front line, and now the King's Fund has confirmed it. People with mental illnesses tend to gravitate there, and there are higher rates of homelessness, drug abuse and alcoholism. Critics of high-securityhospitals have complained for more than a decade that they are too big and too institutionalised to deliver modern standards of care, and should be broken up and their patients distributed to smaller units.What the two reports show is that the Government is failing patients at both ends of the spectrum - the killers in Broadmoor as well as the schizophrenics for whom community care is simply not there London has special problems. This runs counter to the Government's professed commitment to community care. The number of secure beds for people regarded as too dangerous for an ordinary hospital has almost doubled in London but only one in three districts in the capital has community "crisis" teams aimed at keeping people out of hospital.A separate investigation into Broadmoor by the NHS watchdog, the Commission for Health Improvement, is expected to say that the high-security hospital is not fit to care for patients. While spending on the NHS as a whole increased by 28 per cent from 1997, spending on mental health in London increased by just 14 per cent.At the same time, there is a new emphasis on incarcerating people in locked wards.
What "London's State of Mind" reveals is the disgraceful neglect of mental health that persists. Ministers pledged to break this cycle of despair by declaring mental health one of Labour's earliest priorities soon after they came to power in 1997. A strategy was launched in 1999 to switch the emphasis from hospital to community care. Prevention and crisis resolution were to be the watchwords and more than £1bn of extra cash was promised up to 2004.Now the King's Fund, the independent health policy think-tank, has completed an inquiry into mental health care in London, to be published on Tuesday, which was supposed to provide the first snapshot of progress. As well as being crowded and unpleasant, the atmosphere on the wards is often threatening and sometimes violent, and there is the stigma. |
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