North East London mental hospital not providing basic mental health training

North East London mental hospital not providing basic mental health training

By James Simons-

A North East London hospital has been blasted for not providing basic mental health training to it’s staff.

Suicidal patients at an east London hospital have been left at risk of hanging themselves, according to a report.

In its latest report, the Care Quality Commission rated North East London  NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) responsible for mental health services across Redbridge, Waltham Forest, and Essex, as ‘requires improvement, stating that the child and adolescent mental health wards at the Brookside unit of Goodmayes Hospital were ”inadequate”.

The report stated that potential ways for vulnerable young people to hang themselves in the disabled toilets of the Willows ward at Brookside. It slammed NELFT for it’s staff shortages, and haste to forcibly restrain young mental health patients and outdated search policy. The east London hospital was shut shortly after, and now due to reopen it shortly.

The inspectors discovered that two days before their arrival, an elderly patient had fallen out of bed and there was no alarm system in place to notify staff. Also alarming to inspectors was the fact that the Mental Health Act had not been including in a number of staff’s basic training. Shameful as this is, this fundamental lack of training is common in many organisations.

Jon Abrams, from mental concern for Mental Health, told the eye of media.com that he found the findings of the investigation particularly alarming, in terms of it’s overall delivery of care to it’s vulnerable children and young adults.

Overall, it’s disappointing, and a lot more has to be done to make effective help more available to children and young people in Redbridge. The impact of childhood mental health problems can be far reaching, causing distress to patients and their families, as well as schools and the wider society”. With the knowledge of how distressing the impact of mental health problems can be, it begs the question how an organisation established to attend to the well beings of mental health patients, can have such alarming failings and fundamental lack of basic training about mental health, to its staff

All was not gloom and doom for the mental health hospital, because 9 of the NELFT’s 14 assessment areas, including community mental health services for people with learning disabilities and older people, received a ”good” rating.  However, this has done little to  change the terrible failing that has exposed the high incompetence level previously at work at the hospital.

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