In this day and age when we are fully aware that 1 in every 4 in this country will suffer from some sort of mental illness, we hear today that our mental health services are unsafe and at crisis point.
With people being forced to travel hundreds of miles in some cases to see relatives who have only been found a bed that far away and the pressure to free up beds is now leading to far too early discharges. We hear from senior management that the services cannot cope with the demand. The knock on effects of an inadequate service are possibly too dramatic to contemplate.
We’ve heard that the National Health Service has shut down nearly 1,700 beds in the last 2 years and that people are being admitted to hospital without a bed and patients are being sent to private agencies at a multi-million pound cost to the national health service – and therefore us. So, those in the community that need help for their mental health conditions are, in effect, contributing towards a dysfunctional and dangerous situation.
Perhaps the chancellor on his trips abroad can persuade the Chinese to invest in psychiatric care for the British as we don’t seem to be capable of doing it for ourselves.
by 