Watchdog slams clinic where River Cafe girl died – for letting its patients smuggle in drugs
A £5,000-A-WEEK psychiatric hospital where a young sculptress was found dead last autumn has been heavily criticised by a health watchdog for letting patients take illegal drugs into their rooms.
Daisy Boyd, 28, the granddaughter of River Cafe co-founder Rose Gray, apparently took her own life at the Nightingale Hospital in London last October, months after she split from her publishing heir fiance Dan Macmillan.
She died after cocaine and razor blades were apparently smuggled into her room in the upmarket treatment centre in Marylebone, which specialises in addiction and eating disorders.
Now the Care Quality Commission, which regulates hospitals, has published a scathing report outlining a series of failings at the Nightingale – including the charge that not enough was being done to stop illicit substances being taken onto the premises. The document was based on several visits that inspectors made in mid-January – more than three months after Miss Boyd died.
A summary of the CQC’s findings said processes and procedures needed to be reviewed at the Nightingale to tackle the problem of illicit substances, which it described as ‘a significant challenge for staff to manage’.
The report explained that staff did search patients on admission ‘ and targeted their searches at other times if there was cause for suspicion’, but the problem was nonetheless a frequent one. Overall, it gave the institution an amber rating, meaning it ‘requires improvement’. Daisy Boyd was found dead at the Nightingale on October 5 last year. A year earlier, she had celebrated her engagement to Dan Macmillan, great-grandson of Tory PM Harold Macmillan and heir to a £300 million publishing fortune, at a lavish party at London’s River Cafe, co-founded by her grandmother, who died in 2010, and Ruth Rogers.
At a pre-inquest hearing in March, her father, Tim Boyd, said: ‘She was certainly showing other patients that she had cocaine.’
He also voiced concerns about security, adding: ‘ The fact anybody can wander in and out… is a major issue.’
The CQC also noted that a string of problems identified in its previous report, published last June, had not been fixed, including the lack of an alarm system to summon help in an emergency and staff having ‘ insufficient training’ to support patients with addictions and eating disorders.
The hospital’s amber rating remained unchanged.
A Nightingale spokeswoman said staff did their best to prevent illicit substances being brought on site but it was difficult as patients were legally allowed to come and go as they pleased.
She said that since the CQC’s inspection, the hospital had ‘ e nhanced its comprehensive ac tion pl a n… to address t he issues raised’.