In Love With The NHS New Perfume ?

In love with the NHS madam ?

Well maybe, but sometimes the perfume overwhelms people so they die of it .

Following article below attributed to the Observer

Hundreds die in 'hidden world'

of mental hospitals

Campaigners warn that too many women are sectioned on locked wards

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• Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent
• The Observer, Sunday 12 July 2009
• Article history

Hundreds of people are dying every year while sectioned under the Mental Health Act, the Observer can reveal.

New figures released by the Ministerial Council on Deaths in Custody show that in the past 10 years 3,540 of those detained in NHS facilities, including high-security psychiatric hospitals, have died.

The figures have been condemned as "horrific" by the Howard League for Penal Reform, which will launch a campaign tomorrow called Lost Daughters, calling for fewer women and girls to be held in custody. As part of its campaign, the charity will place a memorial advert in the Observer every time there is a death.

"These numbers are horrific," said Frances Crook, director of the Howard League. "These are closed institutions. These deaths are happening away from the public eye. We need to scrutinise exactly what's going on in this shadowy, hidden world."

The figures reveal that more than 800 of the 1,979 male deaths and almost 300 of the 1,561 deaths among women over the 10-year period were from unnatural causes, including suicides and accidents.

These patients were largely middle-aged, with about half dying outside the hospital, either during home leave or during periods when they were absent without permission.

Anna Savage, from Thundersley, Essex, took the South Essex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to court last year, arguing that it had taken insufficient care to protect her mother, who committed suicide after walking out of hospital. Hospitals must now take reasonable measures to avoid harm to patients who have been sectioned.

Rethink, a mental health charity, said that the figures revealed a "hidden scandal". They added that many of the deaths attributed to natural causes could be prevented.

"We assume that because these people are being kept in so-called 'hospitals', whether they are secure or psychiatric, they are receiving a satisfactory level of physical care," They said. "This is often far from the case.

"Psychiatric hospitals have far fewer facilities than normal hospitals, so patients don't get the day-to-day help they need. In addition, transferring patients with serious health issues to normal hospitals can be very difficult, because doctors often don't want to have these people on their wards."

Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, which offers advice to bereaved families about deaths in custody, said the current investigation system into these deaths is "not fit for purpose".

"These deaths do not receive sufficient public scrutiny and contentious deaths are escaping any public scrutiny," she said. "As a vulnerable group, mentally ill detained patients are deserving of protection, and failure to implement preventative measures against their heightened risk of suicide and self-harm could lead to a breach of the European convention on human rights."