Failings in mental health care demand decisive action

Our reporting of the failings of the Huntercombe Hospital in Maidenhead, renamed Taplow Manor, and finally closed in 2023, should act as a warning of what can happen in the mental healthcare sector.

Most mental healthcare in Britain is good and compassionate, where it is available. The biggest problem is long waiting lists, especially for young people, and especially at a time when mental illness is becoming more common among young people for reasons that are not well understood, according to the The Independent.

But The Independent’s campaigning journalism, led by our award-winning reporter Rebecca Thomas, has revealed the dangers of institutions such as Huntercombe when they fail to meet the standards that every patient has a right to expect.

Huntercombe had a history of poor care, which its owners repeatedly insisted to the authorities they were putting right. It should have been closed a long time before it finally shut its doors.

In our report today, Philip King, a former Huntercombe Group executive, speaking out for the first time, says that the hospital should have been closed years before it was.

Our report focuses on the tragic case of Ruth Szymankiewicz, a 14-year-old patient who died in 2022, two days after she fatally self-harmed when she was left alone by an inexperienced care worker, who had had a day and a half of training, and who was hired under a fake ID.

In the five years before Ruth’s death, the Care Quality Commission, the body charged with ensuring that hospitals, care homes, and mental health services provide safe and effective care, published four reports warning about standards at the hospital.

Ruth’s parents feel that they were misled when the Commission, which had rated the hospital “inadequate” in February 2021, changed it in July 2021, saying that improvements had been made. Our report reveals that just 11 days before Ruth died, the watchdog raised fresh concerns about understaffing at the hospital and found staff were not being told what was required of them.

We believe that Ruth’s death and the wider failings of Huntercombe contain two important lessons, and we hope that Wes Streeting, the health and social care secretary, will act upon them.

One is that the Care Quality Commission did not act quickly enough or forcefully enough when concerns about Huntercombe were raised. It allowed itself to be fobbed off too easily by assurances from the managers that the failings were being addressed.

Inertia means that there will often be a temptation to keep an institution going rather than shut it down, causing disruption to patients. But the Commission should be readier to take bold action and to bring in entirely new providers. Sometimes, starting afresh, rather than simply changing the name on the board outside, as happened in this case, is the only way to change a deep problem.

The other lesson is that the Mental Health Act should be changed to protect children’s access to their families while they are detained in mental health hospitals. One of Huntercombe’s biggest failings, according to Ruth’s parents, was that she was denied visits by her family, which caused her huge distress.

They are backed by Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, who told The Independent that the law should be changed to allow families to visit whenever they like. “This was cruelly and wrongly denied to Ruth’s parents, so we must act now to stop it from ever happening again,” Dame Rachel said.

Mr Streeting must demand a tougher approach from the Care Quality Commission, and he should change the law so that inpatient care is less likely to isolate children from their support networks and families. It is too late to secure justice for Ruth, but it can never be too late to learn the lessons from her death.