2023-05-06 13:47:32
Shocking new data in the UK has revealed that thousands of children with mental illnesses are being treated in unsuitable public hospital wards, where some have had to stay for more than a year, and staff are not properly trained to look after them.
New figures revealed by The Independent show that at least 2,838 children requiring mental health care were admitted to non-psychiatric hospitals last year, as NHS facilities were short of staff. specialists, and from high numbers of patients.
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It turns out that children with eating disorders – who often need to be restrained in order to be fed through tubes – are among those patients routinely placed in general wards. This means that health workers who have not received any specialized training, including security guards, sometimes restrain these young patients.
The head nurse at one hospital told The Independent that doormen had to be trained to restrain young patients in children’s wards, traumatizing both patients and staff.
One of the women, Elizabeth Grady, confirmed to The Independent that her teenage daughter, who had an eating disorder, was forced – while waiting to secure a bed in the mental health ward – to stay in a general pediatric ward for 14 weeks, where security guards were on duty. daily restriction.
This comes at a time when data obtained by The Independent indicated the following:
• In 2022, nearly 70,000 children attended A&E departments requiring mental health care, of whom 4,825 had to wait more than 12 hours to be seen – nearly twice the number who waited that long long term in 2021.
• The number of children with eating disorders being treated in pediatric wards has more than doubled in three years, increasing from 473 in 2019 to 1,029 in 2022.
• A mental patient spent 260 days in a general ward in 2022, while another child has been in another hospital for 386 days since 2021.
Dr Camilla Kingdon, chair of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said she was “deeply concerned” about the situation. “We are now facing a situation where children and young people with eating disorders or mentally ill health, who are placed on long waiting lists for treatment, are more and more forced into emergency departments, only to be referred to general pediatric wards,” she said. This is simply not the right or proper situation.”
“We have to deal with this situation, or it will be our children who will pay the biggest price. It is time to put these little ones – who have often been overlooked in health policy – back at the center of the political agenda,” she added.
‘Shocking methods of restraint’
It is understood that there is currently no requirement by NHS for its affiliated hospitals to document the ways in which young patients are restrained in children’s wards. The parliamentarian in the British opposition Labor Party, Olivia Blake – who wrote for the “Independent” – described this fact as “an expected and imminent scandal”.
“I have heard horrific stories of staff having to close entire wards to other patients for carrying out restraint procedures,” she wrote. “In other cases, security guards have been brought in to restrain patients. One organization told me it has started providing mental health support to medical staff who are involved in policing.” patients under these conditions.
One NHS chief nurse told The Independent that the “biggest” challenge in paediatrics at the hospital where she works is dealing with the number of children with eating disorders, which has tripled. Prior to the COVID pandemic, for patients who had to be admitted to the necessary wards in the hospital to receive care.
She pointed out that “most children’s hospitals have one or two places (for these children), but they will not have the ability to face the current crisis facing the children’s mental safety sector.”
An NHS leader also confirmed that hospitals had had to use their own doormen to restrain children in recent months as the need for this increased. “They are usually strong, middle-aged men,” he said. “While almost all of these children have suffered from previous psychological trauma in their lives, they are forced to undergo even greater trauma, as a result of their movement being restricted by these non-specialized men.”
“The staff themselves, too, were really traumatized, and had to undergo sessions and sometimes review with our psychologists (meetings where they can talk about their experiences and feelings with professionals, discuss challenges they face, and receive emotional support),” the health officer notes.
Responses received under the Freedom of Information Act from 54 hospitals across England – more than a third of all NHS hospitals – showed that 2,838 admissions of children with a mental health condition to physical health wards were recorded in 2022. This number is slightly lower than in 2021 when admissions for these patients rose to 3,461 across these hospitals. The average number of days that mental health patients spent in those wards was 12 days.
“A horror movie experience”
Ms Grady’s teenage daughter, who suffers from autism, had a mental health crisis in 2021 and had to spend 14 weeks in the general children’s ward at a hospital in Essex, while waiting to secure a bed in the child and adolescent mental health ward.
Ms Grady described the experience as “terrible” and “like a horror movie”. She said, “She was tied up for consecutive hours by (6) hospital security guards… There were also up to 6 health workers inside the room holding her while a tube (nasogastric feeding) was being passed into her stomach, and then the tube had to be removed every Once”.
The girl’s mother adds, “None of the consultant doctors at the hospital had mental safety training, as they explained to me. Furthermore, the room environment was not at all suitable for treating mental health conditions. There were obviously a lot of young children walking around.” “Round around all the time, without treatment. There are no nurses on the ward who are clearly trained in dealing with mental health patients. It’s very dangerous.”
Ms. Grady noted that the community eating disorder treatment team was only able to visit patients twice a week, and sometimes trained mental health nurses from outside agencies were available, but she said they were there primarily to restrain her daughter’s movement.
Eventually, while in the public health ward, Mrs. Grady’s daughter’s condition worsened to the point where she developed psychosis (a mental disorder involving forms of hallucinations and delusions).
“She and I were left with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which we are now trying to treat, not only us, but also the nurses on the ward who suffered terribly, because they had no support in this area,” she says. “.
This remained the case until her daughter was transferred to an inpatient unit that does not apply the patient restraint practice and whose staff is trained to support people with autism, and the girl was finally released from the hospital after making sure that she was now able to manage her affairs.
‘Massive overcrowding’
NHS Digital (provides digital technology and data services to the health and social care sectors) reports that the number of children requiring mental healthcare has risen dramatically in the aftermath of the recent pandemic, with an estimated one in Every 6 children between the ages of 6 and 16 have a mental health condition, compared to 1 in 9 in 2017.
Doctors and heads of NHS facilities told The Independent that public hospitals were still not equipped to manage children’s mental well-being needs.
Research published this year in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that only 26 percent of general hospitals specializing in acute medical conditions had a child mental wellness service in 2019.
Of those institutions, only one hospital met the target of 11 dedicated full-time mental health staff, while only 19 percent had 24/7 access to these services.
Dr Virginia Davies, former chair of child relations psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, confirmed that the number of crisis children referred to A&E departments had “risen dramatically over time”.
She added that some of the reasons are due to the difficulty of accessing the community-based Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), but others are due to the interruption of early intervention services.
Dr Davies noted that the “vast majority” of staff in public hospitals are physical healthcare practitioners, while there are very few certified mental health workers in hospitals. This means that many pediatric centers will be under increasing mental health pressures, both on their wards and in their clinics, but will not have the staff equipped to deal with this crisis. “We have absolutely no experience with children’s mental well-being in many hospitals,” she said.
“Local CAMSS are under enormous pressure and are now fully overwhelmed. As a result, they are unable to see regular community referrals due to staffing shortages – so they find it difficult to provide assistance (in hospitals) in When she tries to take over her other duties.”
“It seems that we still have this strange and outdated perception of physical health care that all a hospital needs are doctors, nurses and professionals trained only in physical health,” she said.
An NHS spokesperson said: “The latest figures show that our facilities are now treating more young people than ever before, while the mental health workforce continues to grow. In line with this demand, more than Two thousand trained psychologists inside schools provide additional and early support, and we call on the various parties that need help to contact us in this regard.”
A spokesman for the British Department of Health and Social Care confirmed that two billion and 500 million pounds (3 billion and 125 million US dollars) are invested annually in mental health services, which means that an additional 345 thousand children will be able to obtain the necessary care by the year 2024.
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