Beds shortage that shames us all

A HIGH COURT judge has highlighted the shameful lack of resources for those with mental health problems this week by warning that we’ll have ‘blood on our hands’ if the authorities release a suicidal teenager.

The teenager, known only as X, is due to be discharged from the secure unit where she is being held for assaulting a police officer, but no appropriate bed in a mental health unit had been found when the judge made his comments.

I have seen this so many times myself. I have stood in A&E dozens of times, pleading with managers to try to find a bed for someone who was suicidal or psychotic and not safe to go home.

It’s not the manager’s fault: there simply aren’t the beds available. Patients have sometimes waited for

days for a bed. Imagine that. Life is so bad that you no longer want to be alive, yet you have to sit on a chair in A&E, in the same clothes, eating sandwiches, waiting for someone to get kicked out of their bed in a psychiatric unit somewhere else.

A few months ago, I sat in a meeting discussing the most high-risk patients under my care when a manager came in and casually mentioned that she’d just been informed by NHS England that there was not a single bed available in any eating disorder unit in the entire country. Not one.

The NHS had used up every available eating disorder bed in the private sector, too. There was literally not a single bed in the whole country. This

has to change. It’s dangerous and inhumane. These vulnerable people deserve so, so much better than this.