Stars’ rehab clinic... the troubling truth
Undercover report reveals new staff and safety fears
ITS FLAGSHIP hospital i s celebrated as the rehab clinic of choice where Kate Moss is among the stars who have been treated.
But an undercover investigation into another psychiatric hospital in the Priory chain has revealed a very different picture, amid claims of understaffing and ‘ unacceptable’ behaviour by employees.
In one incident a young woman appeared to have her finger bent back during a struggle with staff when she entered a drugs storeroom which had been left open. In another, an undercover reporter tried in vain to summon help from colleagues for more than three minutes during a violent incident with a patient.
The disturbing scenes will raise questions about the hundreds of millions paid to the Priory Group each year by the NHS. The group’s flagship hospital in Roehampton, South-West London – which charges up to £950 a day – has treated celebrities such as Robbie Williams, Eric Clapton and Kate Moss for alcohol or drug problems.
The Mail on Sunday has previously highlighted a spate of suicides at some of the more than 100 hospitals in the group, which also faced criticism from watchdogs at the Care Quality Commission.
But in an astonishingly candid statement, Joey Jacobs, boss of Priory’s American parent company Acadia, which returned a gross profit of £2billion in 2016, admits hoping the NHS would axe more psychiatric facilities to boost Acadia’s coffers further.
‘What we hope does occur is that they continue to close beds and have a need to outsource those patients to the private providers,’ he told shareholders last October. ‘We would be the big winner there.’
Channel 4 Dispatches sent a female undercover reporter to work at The Dene, a medium-security psychiatric clinic near Burgess Hill, West Sussex, where, on her first solo shift, she was handed an alarm and radio, only to be told: ‘Can I be straight? This won’t always get you the response you need.’ It turned out to be prophetic.
A few days later she was left in a room with a potentially suicidal patient who had made a ligature and was tying it around her own neck. The reporter put out an emergency call on her radio and struggled with the patient to stop her self-harming for three minutes before a member of staff who was nearby came to her aid.
In another incident, a woman patient who walked into a drug cupboard was wrestled out by a staff member who hurt her finger in the struggle and used his knee in her back to push her out of the room. Joy Duxbury, a professor of mental health nursing, told the programme: ‘To see someone put their knee in an individual’s back is totally unacceptable.’
A spokesman for the hospital said: ‘We have taken these concerns very seriously and have already taken action to investigate and address the issues identified. Although we accept further improvements are required at The Dene, at its last CQC inspection in June 2017 the hospital was rated as “good” … We are gravely concerned that the footage has been used to present a one-sided picture.’