From:
http://www.labournet.net/ukunion/0510/nhsleeds1.htmlLeeds Mental Health Trust suspends AMICUS rep in safety row
Report by Mark Metcalf
Published: 08/10/05
7 October
Leeds Mental Health NHS Teaching Trust has suspended AMICUS trade union health and safety representative Paul Cockcroft. This comes only days before he was to appear before Leeds City Council Scrutiny Committee to answer questions from councillor’s concerned about safety standards at three new mental health units built under PFI.
The Trust’s management also failed to pass on the invitation to attend from the scrutiny committee to Chris Hindle, the Fire Officer at the Trust who has made clear that in his view the units are “not suitable for people with Mental Health problems.”
Chief Executive Chris Butler came in for a hard time at the Trust’s recent AGM where he did not dispute that the three reports that were commissioned in 2005, costing taxpayers a sum rumoured to exceed five figures, simply confirmed what a previous report from Hindle had told the trust in 2004. His excuse for this was that the recent reports were ‘independent’, yet someone working for NHS Estates, hardly independent, carried them out!
The reports by Chris Newman of NHS estates were to be confidential. They provide disturbing reading. In each case they conclude that ‘the design of the premises falls short of the standard expected... for those with mental illness or learning difficulties’. [1]
Shortcomings in ‘each of the five key areas of documentation, design, construction, operation and management in relation to the requirements of Firecode guidance’ form the background to each of the reports. All of this was revealed to members of the public after an employee of the Trust passed them onto the Yorkshire Evening Post, who then ran a series of articles in late June and early July. [2]
What the YEP however was unable to reveal was the fact that many of these problems had been brought to the attention of the Trusts senior staff as long ago as June 2003 and that they had failed to take any action since then to rectify them.
This is revealed from the contents of a letter from the Trust Fire Officer C Hindle dated May 24th 2004 to the Chief Executive of Leeds Mental Health Trust in which he writes that he had ‘exhausted all other possibilities’ of raising the ‘problem’ of ‘the practical status of the nhs firecode’.
Mr Hindle states that he had “had concerns from the outset with regard to the physical complexity of one of these buildings in particular and the lack of Fire Service facilities in all of them.” His concern arose after visits ‘from various crews from Fire Stations who will cover the buildings’ during which ‘the crews noted the same operational problems’.
Mr Hindle ‘noted many departures from the NHS Firecode’ and says so in his letter and states that he brought these matters to ‘attention of the Planning Team at the time and the Facilities General Manager on several occasions’.
He writes in the letter that it had been explained to him ‘that the design [had] not embraced the usual design parameters for a hospital purely on economic grounds and that the three hospitals were in fact designed to the general standard of Patients Hospitals’.
The letter goes on to further state that requests to rectify a number of major concerns ‘have been ignored for 12 months’ [i. e. since June 2003] and ‘in desperation’ he admits to having ‘threatened to bring the matter to the attention of the media’. Over two years later, these major concerns have still to be rectified.
Whilst all this has been going on urgently needed works to bring Becklin Centre in Burmantofts, The Mount near Leeds General Infirmary and the Newsam Centre at Seacroft Hospital have still not been started, putting NHS staff and patients lives at continued risk.
Meanwhile union representatives on the Health and Safety Committee of Leeds Mental Health Trust have followed up their concerns about ‘not all incidents of missing patients being reported to Risk Management’ making it ‘difficult to assess the frequency of police call-outs to return missing patients to wards’ [3] by writing to the Head of Risk Management to request data on the number ‘of awol clients reported to the police’ [4] between June 2004 and 2005.
One set of figures that has been obtained by union representatives has however revealed that Leeds Mental Health Teaching NHS Trust topped the national charts for the numbers of unwanted fire signals in 2003-2004. In comparison to the County Durham and Darlington Priority Services NHS Trust with just one the Leeds Trust had 113 unwanted fire signals. Inconvenient as these may be it is nothing compared to the dangers that patients at the three mental health units are being placed in whilst management fail to act on the dangers identified by their own Fire Safety Officer as long as two years ago.
[1] Becklin, The Mount and Newsam Centre’s Fire Safety Review Confidential reports dated May 2005.
[2] See for example the Yorkshire Evening Post dated June 14th 2005 article titled ‘New Mental Health units ‘at risk from fire, ‘ says report.
[3] Minutes of the Leeds Mental Health Trust Health and Safety Committee held on Tuesday March 22nd 2005.
[4] Letter from Paul Cockcroft of AMICUS to Head of Risk Management dated July 25th 2005.
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