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Mental health ‘disaster’
• I WOULD like to take the opportunity of the appointment of Richard Arthur as chairman of the Camden and Islington Foundation Trust for mental health, to draw people’s attention to the disastrous policy whereby all mental patients over 65 in Camden are placed in a geriatric ward, regardless of their condition or illness.
I was a patient (aged 68) in the famous Cedar Ward of St Pancras Hospital in July 2006 and can witness to the following.
Despite wonderful nursing and administration, both stretched to the limit by the pitiful state of many of the patients who were suffering from dementia, the ward was often reduced to a state of simple damage limitation. There was often urine on the floor and any privacy was made impossible by patients who did not know what they were doing.
Toilets were often blocked with rubber gloves and new toilet rolls. The shower units had no fittings so you were, in effect, sluicing yourself down with a rubber hose.
You were not allowed to serve yourself at meal times . Large amounts of, often very wholesome, food was put on your plate, resulting in massive waste, because patients very often didn’t want to eat it.
I recall regularly throwing away at least two large meals a day.
The staff, who were mainly from Caribbean backgrounds and were very experienced and supportive, not just as nurses but as counsellors, were subject to occasional racial abuse, but you could tell that they regarded this as the least of their problems. They had the impossible task of running a mixed (male and female) ward of psychiatric cases of differing kinds and dementia cases, also of different kinds.
This policy of collecting all mental patients together in a geriatric ward is cruel and counter-productive. It undoes all the work done by the Mental Health Crisis Response Team, who in my case were caring, and as supportive as they possibly could be.
More than two years have passed since my experience. I hope things have changed for the better and will be very interested to hear of other people’s experiences, particularly from the over -65s, although it seems to have taken me over two years to get over it.
NICHOLAS JACOBS
Lady Margaret Road, NW5
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