One person a week 'killed by a mentally ill patient'

13 April 2012

A damning official report has revealed one person a week dies at the hands of a mentally ill patient.

Nearly a third of the killers were judged not to be a risk to the public, while one-in-six deaths were blamed on the failure to ensure patients took their medication properly.

The report has been produced by Professor Louis Appleby, the Government's national clinical director for mental health, for the National Patient Safety Agency.

He is expected to conclude that health staff have failed to identify those patients most at risk of killing someone.

"This is really to do with how mental health staff rate a person as low or high risk. Sometimes they just become desensitised to the risks they are dealing with," Professor Appleby said.

Health Minister Rosie Winterton today denied that the Government was failing to protect people from the dangerous mentally ill but conceded the Government couldn't force discharged patients to take their medication.

The report comes after an inquiry into the killing of retired banker Denis Finnegan by paranoid schizophrenic John Barrett in London's Richmond Park found significant failings in the risk-management process.

Today Ms Winterton told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend: "One of the problems at the moment is for the small number of people who are detained in hospital.

"If they are discharged there are some patients who don't continue to take medication, who don't continue to stay in touch with mental health services. At the moment we have no power to be able to say we want people to comply with treatment."

She said since 2001, 700 community mental health teams had been introduced to work with patients. She admitted that it had been "difficult" to find consensus in Parliament but "robust" legislation was coming before MPs.

She said: "It is important to see it in the wider context as well of improvements and new investment in mental health services. What we need to do now is to make sure that the care that we can provide in the community is reflected in modern legislation."

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in