Mental Health Care (Hampshire)

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Wednesday 18th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my parliamentary neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), not only for the outstanding work he has done to highlight this important issue, which is of grave concern to his constituents and to many residents of southern Hampshire, but for his tireless work to analyse bed availability within the Southern Health trust area. From what he has told us this morning, there can be little doubt that the work done to analyse and challenge the statistics of bed usage, including the somewhat confusing question of what is an available bed and what is simply a leave bed, has taken a great deal of time.

What many of my constituents and other local residents want is to make sure that the outcome of the process is correct for local users of adult mental health services. As my hon. Friend has correctly indentified, this is not an argument about the philosophy of how best to care for those in need. There will always be a need for acute in-patient beds, although we certainly believe there is potential to improve arrangements and thus avoid in-patient admission for those who can be successfully and safely treated in the community. However, what has not been clarified throughout this process is the number of beds that there are in the system and the number of beds that are needed. My hon. Friend has certainly done sterling work over the past few months analysing bed usage, and I do not intend to repeat any of those statistics—we have heard in great detail what may or may not be available. Suffice it to say that, in the past six months, there have been many occasions when there have been no vacant beds across the service.

On top of that, there are many valid questions from service users in my constituency about the choices made about which beds should remain available in the locality. At the start of the year, I attended a meeting organised and hosted by my hon. Friend to learn more about the concerns of local service users and to hear at first hand how important the provision at Woodhaven is to local people, their families and their carers. Given the location of Woodhaven and the distribution of mental health beds across Hampshire, it is inevitable that this closure will impact on not only the constituents of my good Friend, but those of several Members across southern Hampshire. As my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne) has indicated, mental health problems are no respecter of, and trust boundaries are not contiguous with, constituency boundaries.

Of course, when discussing reconfiguration of health services, frequently the focus is on location, and service users will emphasise the distance of travel to get to a facility, the availability of public transport and how convenient it is for loved ones to come and visit. Interestingly, when discussing Woodhaven, that was not the message I received from service users or their families. Indeed, if we were to analyse the journey times and the ease of access, it is possible to argue that, for the vast majority of my constituents, Woodhaven is simply not as accessible as alternative provision at Melbury Lodge in Winchester. Woodhaven is a great deal further away for many people, and the public transport links are much poorer.

However, location has simply not been the focus for any of my constituents who have had experience of either Woodhaven or Melbury Lodge, or indeed both. Far from emphasising convenience, my constituents’ concern has been regarding the quality of provision. The questions they have posed have been eminently sensible. Why is it proposed to deprive acutely ill patients of the benefit of 24 modern en-suite beds that were opened only eight years ago? Why would the trust choose to keep the facility that is not as good, that does not afford the same level of privacy and dignity and that has no en-suite facilities at all? I would like to highlight the comments made to me by just two constituents who have contacted me. The first wrote:

“My wife has been an inpatient at both Woodhaven and Melbury Lodge. Melbury Lodge isn’t anywhere near the standard of Woodhaven. Woodhaven is very pleasant, with a lovely atmosphere. Melbury Lodge by comparison is very intimidating with a lock down high security approach. This may be appropriate for some of their patients but for the majority it’s just scary.”

The second constituent provided me with a very detailed account of his mental health issues, a suicide attempt in 2008, and his own stay at Woodhaven under section. He wrote:

“Having been an inpatient at Woodhaven I would emphasise the privacy. Having a breakdown surrounded by others who do not respect your privacy is very difficult. When I was in acute crisis I desperately needed short term care and support, it would be a disaster for local service users if those high quality short term beds were lost in favour of a less good facility, or worst case scenario, no bed at all.”

I pay tribute to one of my hon. Friend’s constituents, who made a lasting impression on me at the meeting mentioned earlier. He had been an in-patient under section at both Melbury Lodge and Woodhaven and, again, it was the privacy aspect he emphasised. While an in-patient at Woodhaven, he felt he had retained his dignity by being able to have his own bathroom. That clearly made an enormous difference to him personally, and I think we can safely draw the conclusion that a feeling of having some personal space and privacy can greatly improve the overall sense of well-being and aid the chances of a swifter recovery.

I have absolutely no doubt that the facility at Woodhaven is of an extremely high standard; we know that from the comments made by consultant psychiatrists. We know that the demand for short-term acute beds is high, and that one in four of the population suffers from some level of mental health problems at one time or other during their life. We also know that the NHS trust’s figures on bed usage and length of stay at the unit have been called into question. Is now the right time to press ahead with a closure, or is it timely to call a pause to the process until such time as the disputed statistics have been independently analysed?