Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many in-patients in child and adolescent psychiatric in-patient units have died in each year since 2010.

The number of inpatient deaths in child and adolescent mental health services is not collected centrally by the Department of Health.

However, deaths of all patients detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 are notified to the Care Quality Commission (CQC). There were no such deaths reported in 2010/11. They reported that in 2011/12 one person aged 19 or under had died of unnatural causes and none had died of natural causes. In 2012/13 the CQC reported no deaths from unnatural causes and one from natural causes in detained patients aged 19 or under. Their report for 2013/14 (the most recent in the public domain) did not provide a breakdown by age of the deaths of detained patients.[1]

The Department for Education collect and publish data on the number of child deaths reviewed each year, including those where the death occurred in a mental health inpatient unit. These can be found in table 6 of the Statistical First Release ‘Child Death Reviews – year ending 31 March 2015’, available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-death-reviews-year-ending-31-march-2015

However, it is possible that the year in which the review took place, was later than the year in which the death occurred.

The number of reviews of deaths occurring in a mental health inpatient unit have been suppressed in this table (shown with a ‘x’), indicating that there were 5 or fewer, and the actual figure is not shown in order to protect confidentiality. The number of reviews of deaths occurring in a mental health unit from 2010 to 2014 was nil.

[1] Care Quality Commission: Monitoring the Mental Health Act” (annual publications for 2012/13 and 2013/14)