Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will include the quality of inpatient environments and the range of people’s experiences of inpatient treatment in the forthcoming Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch investigation into mental health inpatient care settings.

The Department continues to work with the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) to refine the scope of the upcoming Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) investigation.

Discussions include the following four areas for the investigation: how providers learn from deaths in their care and use that learning to improve their services, including post-discharge; how young people with mental health needs are cared for in inpatient services and how their care could be improved; how out-of-area placements are handled; and how to develop a safe, therapeutic staffing model for all mental health inpatient services.

During the course of a HSIB investigation, HSIB investigators work collaboratively with patients, families and teams within the trusts, as well as spending time observing practice in provider organisations. HSSIB will take the same approach to ensure that there is family and patient involvement, including taking into account people’s experiences, and that they continue to be transparent in the investigation to support learning and achieve system level change.