Mental Health : Be Patient For They Will Even Cremate Themselves

"Crying The Tears Of Helpless Flame"
In memory of Jonathon Brannan Aged 28

By Silvis Rivers (Shared With UserWatch)

You cannot strike back
At the clever NHS
And its slick match pack

But you can cry with
The tears of flame

You can hold up the arms
Of new holocaust walkers
Smoking and dead

On our serviceless
Oven-boards of shame .


Case No. 2

National Death Services

Jonathon Brannan Aged 28 Death by Fire And The Trust's Surpluses

"Can you stand by when people run past in flames , or are a pile of steams and fires ?" - This was said by the bad Samaritan with a financial grin who worked for the NHS Boards of executives in the UK National Health Mental Health Services .

Joe Samaritan of course, and his relatives, had changed . Now he believed greater good could be done by depriving people of cool water tears along with supportive help that over a long time might have calmed some of their painful inner fires .

While Joe prospered as you know like folks on the hill do, Jonathon could not wait for a service anymore His anguish and inner life reached for another liquid which was not so cool . In March 2008 he burned himself alive in Bradford UK by pouring thinners over himself . The Coroner said his death was preventable . His local Mental Health Trust was on target to make a "surplus" of £550k

I'll pick up the post from UKsurvivors which was done in response to a newspaper article (Bradford Telegraph and Argus ) posted by Cyndy. This is a post which promotes a rough correlational "tool" of : "Surpluses made set against patient's needs who die and are deprived of care " .....In UserWatch's recent article about Service User Colville Mark's (Camden London) death it was shown the local Islington based Mental Health Trust was on track to make a surplus of £1.75 million yet Colville had along with 49 other patients been "unallocated" services .

UKSurvivors Post

Case 2 Fireball dad 'could have been saved'. (The Silvis RoughToolkit applied)

In the case (2) of Jonathon Brannan aged 28 - this poor guy burned himself alive in March 2008. Cyndy (Uksurvivors) copied the report from the "socially concerned" Bradford Telegraph - right lets have a look at this and apply the Silvis tool of "Surpluses made - set against deprivation of serious care" (there are a couple of extra points here too a bit later about NIMHE costs .

Questions :

1. Did his local Trust run at a surplus in the relevant period of his death ?

2. Were their indications he needed serious care ?

Answers :


1.

(From the Trust's internal finance report 2007 - 8 )

QUOTE :

2. "OVERVIEW OF FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE

For the eight months ended the 30th November 2007 the Trust is reporting a surplus of £983k; a favourable variance of £635k compared to the planned position at the end of November. On the basis of current performance and the assumptions within the year end forecast, the Trust is projecting that it will make a surplus of income over expenditure of £550k at the end of the financial year. This is in line with the financial plan approved by the Trust Board in March 2007.

A summary of the Trust's financial performance at the end of November 2007 is provided in Appendix A. "

2.

"Mr Whittaker, [Coroner] who is writing to health minister Alan Johnson and chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson, said he believed 28-year-old Jonathan Brannan's death would have been prevented if there had not been a delay in getting him assessed by a community psychiatrist nurse."


So there we have it Jonathon's death was preventable according to a Coroner . Slow assessment equals "NO Care" . Why ?

Because lean-finance practice at Trusts pressured to make surpluses in the bid for the new waves of "Foundation status" (or to clear, artificial "debt" ) equals more staff rationing (cost control) per potential patient seen .

Boiled down it actually equals NHS MH Trusts shaving off costs where they can and they mainly do that on staff ratios and that emerges in restricted inflow of patients seen .

In this Bradford Case of Jonathon Brannan we have a further gems of knowledge buried in the latest Trust financial reports

Take this :

Part of NIMHE was ceding its budget over to Bradford District MH Care Trust and that was

£1,400,000 for the year 2007 - 8 (set against a banked amount the Trust carried for NIMHE from the DOH of £6,747,000)

Its difficult to see completely into this Trust like others for the amount of Users they are employing to become the "voices" of others . In others words the costs of the Inhouse-User-economy-bubble factor But like other Trust's it is Top-Down controlled with the twin weave of mystifying policy objectives going right the way through it , as well as very poor demystification of its financial language ..

But Jonathon's death was inside a larger social context which helped to kill him by neglect when he could no longer bear what was inside his feelings and mind ..There was nothing to cool his state. So he burst into fire ..

NIMHE with its service-user-bureacracy need scrapping - they are rolling out bullshit meetings and more civil servants and Jonathon could have done with a Bradford team to assess him. My estimate is it another would have cost less that a third of that amount : 1.4 million . The Trust saved money but they did not save Jonathon .

As a comparison of the costs of a team Birmingham and Solihull MH Trust ran a team of 45 staff for serious BPD conditions for about 2.4 million .....

This is the begininng of a public dossier perhaps ...? It needs a number of people on it though .. Any takers ? Every now and then perhaps ? Just set the Audit Commission's reports of the MH Trusts against patient dead in the same account years for those who needed care and never got it . Trusts are also creating access to the financial board papers although it would not surprise me if DOH spies would not look in on this potential route of emarrasment and find some way to skew transparency . This is the kind of thing they can do because this is a very politically driven organisation .

Silvis rivers Aug 2008