Committee members hit out at plans over mental health units

TENSIONS BOILED over atNorth Yorkshire County Council’s scrutiny of health committee in a debate over a mental health unit.

The meeting heard Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Trust had asked its board to close a Harrogate mental health unit and scrap long-held plans to build a £16m mental health hospital in the town at the same time a mental health unit was closed in Northallerton.

The trust’s director of operations, Adele Coulthard, said it aimed to increase the level and intensity of community services in order to reduce the need for people to be either admitted to or have extended stays in hospital.

After stating the trust aimed to provide in-patient beds where hospital admission is required from larger, more specialist facilities, such as at York, she voiced frustration about being repeatedly challenged by councillors who appeared incensed by the trust’s recommendations.

The committee’s chairman, Councillor Jim Clark, said it was unfortunate the Harrogate inpatient facilities could be lost while the county was also in the process of losing the facility serving the districts of Hambleton and Richmondshire.

He said: “The country is crying out for mental health beds and yet in Harrogate they are going to be closing them, in Northallerton they are going to be closing them.”

Questioning the rationale behind JIM CLARK: Said the county was ‘crying out’ for mental health beds as two towns were closing them.

abandoning plans for a new mental health hospital in Harrogate, he said: “I can’t believe things have changed so much in the last few years that you are now going to be writing off millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in relation to this.”

Nigel Ayre, operations manager of Healthwatch North Yorkshire, said a great deal of positive work had seen North Yorkshire move from the only region in England with no health-based places of safety for people at crisis point to one with four, but the proposals could lead to only two in England’s largest county.

In addition, he said, the Harrogate facility had been used as a justification for the closure of the Northallerton site.

He urged the trust to reconsider its recommendation and launch a thorough consultation exercise with the public.