Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what legal recourse is available to medicated patients in mental health facilities who believe that they may have been administered with excessive medication.

Patients have the right, set out in the NHS Constitution, to make a complaint about any aspect of National Health Service care, treatment or services and to have that complaint properly investigated.

The NHS complaints procedure, including the process for investigating and responding to a complaint, is set out in secondary legislation, primarily the Local Authority Social Services and National Health Service Complaints (England) Regulations 2009.

Anyone wishing to make a complaint can do so either to the service provider or to the commissioner. If they are not happy with the outcome of their complaint, they have the right to ask the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to investigate.

Care and Treatment Reviews (CTRs), and Care, Education and Treatment Reviews (CETRs) for the under 18s, are undertaken for anyone with learning disabilities, autism or both who may be at risk of admission to, or who is already in, a specialist learning disability or mental health hospital.

The purpose of the CTR, or CETR, is to ensure that an individual’s care and treatment is still meeting their needs and both CTRs and CETRs will assess whether medication is being used appropriately and that steps are being taken to minimise the use of any psychotropic medication. The review team, which is led by the responsible commissioner with support from independent expert advisers who bring additional challenge to the process, will make recommendations to improve the individual’s care with follow-up checks to ensure that this is happening.