As regular readers of this blog will by now understand, I’m not one of those morons who will clap like performing seals whenever Britain’s state controlled healthcare system, the National Health Service (NHS) is mentioned. Not for me the State approved and encouraged idol worship of a healthcare service that not only fails Britons on a regular basis, is stuffed full of worthless and counterproductive parasites such as ‘diversity and inclusion’ workers but which is a system that has never ever been copied by any other nation, at least not in its entirety.

I have damned good reasons for not wanting to praise the NHS or treat it as some sort of Golden Calf to be worshipped. The NHS has killed close relatives of mine, nearly crippled others and generally treated those in my family and friendship circle like shit. You can find other articles on the NHS on this site by searching for the term ‘NHS’.

The NHS provides Britons with appalling standards of healthcare, often with outcomes that fall far short of that found in other countries. About the only good thing that you can say about the NHS is that, unlike in the USA, people don’t go bankrupt paying medical bills. However the price that Britons pay for that small advantage is huge. It’s a price that includes poor treatment, lack of choice, arrogant and sometimes cruel staff and the practise of what I call ‘tick box medicine’ where the decisions are made not on a clinical basis but on what the bureaucracy says should be done. There are better ways to provide comprehensive healthcare services to a nation’s citizens that do not have the massive disadvantages caused by having nearly all healthcare paid for and run by the Government. The NHS, because of the way that it was set up and runs, is a system that invites corruption, arse covering and putting the customer, that is the patient, last and the staff and management first. For my American readers, just imagine that your healthcare system is run by what I believe is one of the most inefficient parts of your government, the Department of Motor Vehicles and you will get some idea of just how awful the NHS truly is.

Over the years the NHS has been beset with scandals, often lethal ones, with patients dying of either neglect or from poor or inappropriate treatment. The victims of the NHS are those at all stages of life, ranging the the elderly and going right through to newborn babies. However today’s story of Britain’s horrific NHS concerns a part of it that is really piss poor even when compared to the general piss poor-ness of the NHS in general, that is NHS mental health services.

The NHS mental health services in Essex are bad, really bad. Between 2004 and 2015, eleven patients at NHS mental health services in the county died whilst in the custody of the NHS and reading between the lines of the various press reports, most of them seem to have died by suicide brought about by bad treatment by the NHS. Those investigating the cases of death by NHS in Essex found that wards and rooms where patients were held contained a number of worryingly accessible ‘ligature points’ where disturbed and desperate patients could hang themselves from.

I’m both shocked and disgusted that such a situation in Essex mental healthcare facilities could exist for so long. Surely it doesn’t take a genius to realise that when you are dealing with patients who are mentally disturbed and who may be suicidal, the very last thing that should be done is to give these patients opportunities to commit suicide?

Essex Mental Health services seem to have tolerated a culture of abuse and neglect of some of the most vulnerable in our society, those afflicted by mental health problems and when caught out have done their utmost to deflect blame from themselves. There is a particularly disturbing story from the Nursing Times about a young man named Matthew Leahy, aged 20. This young man, who was suffering from a delusional disorder, was brought into the NHS mental healthcare system by police after being sectioned under the Mental Health Act and placed in a facility run by NHS Essex mental health services. He wasn’t kept safe, he didn’t have a care plan created until after his death in 2012, which looks to me like the NHS was arse covering and trying to divert attention away from their own failings. Whilst incarcerated by the NHS Mr Leahy had made a complaint to staff that he had been raped but this allegation was either not examined nor properly recorded. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman examined the situation at NHS Essex mental health care services and found much to worry about.

The Nursing Times said:

Mr Leahy, who was previously diagnosed as having delusional disorder, was taken to the Linden Centre by police where he was admitted under the Mental Health Act. 

While noting that some aspects of Mr Leahy’s care and treatment were in line with relevant guidelines, the ombudsman found he was not adequately observed and did not have a properly allocated keyworker. 

The investigation also found that the trust did not respond appropriately when he reported being raped and that record keeping was not robust, meaning some paper work was lost.

Mr Leahy’s care plan was written after his death.

The ombudsman also found that the trust’s own investigation into Mr Leahy’s death was “inadequate” and that NEP was not open and honest with his family.

Following the investigation, NHS Improvement has agreed to establish a review in line with the ombudsman’s recommendations.

Yet again we get the usual excuse that is trotted out after every NHS or Social Services failure that ‘lessons will be learned’, but which mysteriously never seem be learned. The Ombudsman’s report in 2019 noted that the NHS should have learned from previous deaths and kept patients safe but did not. However the successor organisation, formed after a reorganisation of the NHS in Essex, found that there had been some improvement and that the service had been rated as ‘good’, although how ‘good’ it is in my view remains to be seen.

Now there’s going to be an enquiry but it is one that falls far short of what the relatives of those who died under the care of NHS mental health services want. The relatives of those who had been treated appallingly by the NHS and where the NHS by its incompetence and corruption was a major factor in the deaths of their loved ones, wanted a full public inquiry able to compel witnesses to appear and carry out a thorough investigation of what went wrong with Essex NHS mental health services. Unfortunately the Government has offered the families an inquiry that is somewhat less than a full public inquiry, something that the Government called an ‘independent inquiry’. I tend to agree with the families on this issue. A ‘half measures’ inquiry is really not good enough. If it cannot compel witnesses to speak under oath then it’s more than likely that not only will the truth of the deaths of many psychiatric patients in Essex not be uncovered, but those in authority in the NHS in Essex and in particular the mental health system will, as is too often the case, escape any form of justice and just be ‘promoted upwards’ and forgotten about instead of being held to account.

Whilst it would be naive to believe that all healthcare systems are perfect, after all any healthcare system, no matter where in the world it is or how it is run, will have the occasional problem, it’s plain to me that the NHS is not just slightly imperfect but instead truly appalling. There are bad apples in any organisation whether that be in healthcare or making widgets, but it seems only in the NHS is so much effort put into shielding the bad apples and allowing the most appalling mistreatment of patients to continue for such significant amounts of time as we have seen in the case of NHS Essex Mental Health Services. The NHS is a cold, uncaring Stalinist monolith that is unfit for purpose and not the health service that the Britons who pay for it deserve. The NHS is an organisation that deserves to die and be replaced by something much better than what we currently have.