By John Tingle
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and social care in England and they have recently produced their annual report to Parliament on how health services are applying the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) .This report, shines a very strong light on failing health care practices in mental health care relating to the MHA. Shocking failures are revealed and the errors are compounded by the fact that the poor practices have been identified in previous reports and are long standing in nature.
The CQC state that national data from the last 25 years shows an increasing use of the MHA to treat people in hospitals. From 2005/06 to 2015/16, the reported number of uses of the MHA to detain people in hospital increased by 40%. There was a 9% increase from 2014/15 to 2015/16 rising to 63,622 uses of the MHA. The CQC can find no single cause for the increases in detention rates over the last 10 years.
The CQC once again draw attention to the persistent theme present in its previous reports of black and minority ethnic over representation figures in the use of the MHA.
The CQC found that there are still services that continue to fail in their legal duties to give patients information about their rights, verbally and in writing as soon as possible after their detention or community treatment order commences. They found no evidence that staff had discussed rights with the patient on admission in 11 % (378) of patient records that they checked. In a further inspection of 9%, (286) of records, no evidence could be found to say that patients received the information in an accessible format.
Consent to treatment
The CQC state that they have concerns about whether the patient consents, refuses consent or is incapable of consent. They expect to see capacity assessments to support views and possibly evidence that staff have considered ways in which they could help the patient gain or regain capacity. They have frequently raised concerns over whether clinicians have recorded evidence of their conversations with patients who are detained over their proposed treatment and their views. Read More