Farleigh Hospital (Inquiry) (Hansard, 7 April 1971)

§ Sir K. Joseph

Yes. I am grateful to Mr. Tasker Watkins and the other members of the Committee of Inquiry for their report, which has been published today as a Command Paper (Cmnd. 4557). I explained in my reply to the hon. Member on 4th March the reason why it could not be published earlier.

The report makes many criticisms of the administration of and conditions at Farleigh in the period up to 1969 which it attributes to deficiencies on the part of the Regional Hospital Board, the Hospital Management Committee and some of their staff. In fairness to the Board, I should add that some problems of management in the Sandhill Park Group were known to the Ministry of Health as well as to the Board, and that neither saw a way of solving them at that time. The report finds that considerable improvement has taken place at Farleigh since 1968, but that there is still too high a concentration of disturbed patients in one large ward where the incidents of ill-treatment took place which led to the setting up of the Committee of Inquiry.

The report contains a number of recommendations. The most far-reaching is that a Health Commissioner should be appointed urgently; I am considering this. There are several recommendations for action designed to ensure that staff at Farleigh and in other hospitals are instructed in ways of preventing violence by disturbed patients and for a code of conduct for nurses in the handling of violent and difficult patients; these I accept in principle; preliminary guidance has already been issued to hospital authorities and I will be pursuing these matters further with the responsible authorities and professional bodies. I am aware of the recent discussions on this subject arranged by the National Association of Mental Health.

Other recommendations concern the administration and staffing at Farleigh; these are accepted in principle and will be dealt with by the Regional Hospital Board who at my request are considering 182W the future management of this group of hospitals. The three other recommendations are of a general nature. One concerns the reporting of deaths to coroners; at my request my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, has referred this recommendation to the Committee on Death Certification and Coroners for consideration in the context of their wider remit; I am also considering whether in the interim further advice on this matter should be given to hospital authorities.

Another recommendation is that the membership of every Regional Hospital Board should include a practising psychiatrist; after careful consideration I have decided not to accept this recommendation, as in my view this is neither necessary nor appropriate; there is already a statutory requirement that at least two members of each Board should be persons with experience in mental health services.

The final recommendation is that Regional Boards should intensify their reviews of the level of expenditure and staffing in hospitals for the mentally handicapped, and should pay particular attention to units housing patients with apparently intractable problems; the Government had already decided to increase the resources to be devoted to improving and developing services for the mentally handicapped, both in hospital and in the community; of the extra £93.5 million which is to be made available for health and welfare services in England during the next four years, about £80 million is expected to be spent on the improvement of the hospital and local authority services for old people, the mentally handicapped and the mentally ill.

I have now asked all Boards to consider particularly the needs of the more difficult patients particularly with a view to preventing situations such as were found at Farleigh.—[Vol. 812, c. 520.]