Todays Observer newspaper carries a particularly unhelpful piece about patient safety in NHS mental care. The headline screams about '4 psychiatric patients dying each day in NHS care' and refers to data collected by the National Patient Safety Agency. 1282 people have died and 913 have suffered severe harm.
Unfortunately, the data doesn't distinguish between people who harmed themselves, people who were harmed by others or people who were themselves harmed by error on the part of the healthcare system. Furthermore, it doesn't distinguish between events that happened within an institutional setting and those that occurred when the patient was in the community.
There is a case study relating to a young woman, suffering from depression, who sought treatment but subsequently committed suicide. The point of the story was that the suicide might have been prevented if the psychiatric nurse had told the victims family more about how bad the situation was. Tragic, but no more than the benefit of hindsight.
Social workers have come in for criticism recently and it seems to me that child protection and mental health share many common problems. First, both deal with the unpredictability of people. Both work under conditions of extreme resource constraint. Both have great difficulty in evaluating the risks present within a situation. Failures in both often lead to tragedy.
I'm still trying to track down the substance of the Observer article. In the meantime, I doubt if this is a good example of reporting a very real issue that needs more light and less heat in order to promote understanding.
Read it here:
www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/apr/12/mental-health-patient-safety
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