Louise (not her real name) had to be looked after by police and security guards and slept in a chair and on a mattress on the floor in A&E at St Helier Hospital in Sutton, south London, because there was no bed in a mental health unit. She became increasingly “desperate, desperate and desperate” as her ordeal continued and, her mental health deteriorating while she waited, she self-harmed by banging her head against a wall. He escaped twice because he didn’t know when he would finally start inpatient care. The woman’s parents, David and Angela, are so distraught by her ordeal that they have written a report about it in the Guardian. In it, they recount how they and their daughter were told the NHS could not find a bed for her in a mental health unit either locally or anywhere in England. Louise arrived in St Helier on the night of Thursday June 16 and did not sleep in an NHS psychiatric unit until the early hours of Saturday June 25, more than eight days later. Last year he was diagnosed with emotionally unstable personality disorder and ADHD. Mental health charity Mind said it believed it was the longest A&E wait anyone experiencing a mental health crisis had ever had and described it as “unacceptable, disgraceful and dangerous”. It called for urgent action to tackle the inadequacy of NHS mental health provision and bed numbers. “Waiting eight and a half days in A&E for a mental health bed is both unacceptable and disgraceful. Mind has never heard of a patient in crisis waiting so long to receive the care they need, and serious questions must be asked about how anyone – let alone an 18-year-old – was allowed to suffer so long without the care they need.” , said Rheian Davies, Mind’s head of legal. “This is dangerous for the staff, who are not trained to provide the acute care the patient needs, and dangerous for the patient, who needs that care immediately – no more than a week later. “This should be a red warning light to every person involved in the decision-making that led to this appalling situation, from the leaders of the trust to the Secretary of State himself. A situation like this is indicative of the dire state mental health crisis care services are in,” Davies said. Chris Grayling, the family’s MP, told them in a letter when they asked for his help that “what you are experiencing is in my view a wrong move away from the provision of inpatient beds in mental health services. I have questioned this over the years, but it is a long-standing direction of travel among mental health trusts.’ He added: “Yours is not the first case of this kind that I have come across.” The Surrey and Borders Trust apologized to Louise for her ordeal and said “severe pressure on our beds” was to blame. “We strive to support the people who need our care and we sincerely apologize when there are occasions when we fall short of the expectations of people who use the services,” said Lorna Payne, its chief operating officer. “We have been experiencing severe pressure on our beds over the last few weeks and when bed pressures occur our first priority is to make sure people are safe. We assess each individual’s clinical needs. “Unfortunately this sometimes means people can wait longer than we would like and sometimes that means we look to our partners in the acute hospital sector to help us.”
