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Mental health patients sent from Dorset to Durham to find a bed for the night

Chronic shortage sees vulnerable patients shunted hundreds of miles

LABOUR has discovered that adults under the care of at least half of England’s NHS mental-health trusts are being sent hundreds of miles from their homes for in-patient treatment.

The data on out-of-area placements was received through Freedom of Information requests sent to all 60 NHS mental health trusts in the country.

Labour’s shadow mental health minister Barbara Keeley said: “It is appalling that some of the most vulnerable people in the country are being sent as far as 300 miles from their homes and families for want of a mental-health bed locally.

“The overwhelming evidence is that out-of-area placements do serious harm to the recovery of people with mental-health conditions.

“This is exactly the type of ‘burning injustice’ the Prime Minister pledged to end; a pledge that has shown repeatedly to be hollow by the Tories’ neglect of mental-health services.”

The FoI requests asked for the furthest distances that adults with severe and complex mental-health issues that carry the risk of self-harm and suicide had been sent from their local areas between 2013-17.

Thirty-five of the 36 trusts that responded and had held data for at least one year reported out-of-area placements. Only one trust reported no out-of-area placements.

Seven out of the 36 said they placed a number of adults more than 300 miles away from home due to the shortage of bed spaces. Seventeen trusts said they had sent people 250 miles away, 24 said they had sent people 200 miles away, and 30 had sent people 150 miles away. Thirty-two reported having placed adults more than 100 miles away from home.

The furthest distance a patient was sent was 325 miles by Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust to a bed in Durham two years ago. Dorset also had the second-highest number of out-of-area placements — 1,381 over those five years — of the trusts that responded to the FOI requests.

Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust had the highest number: 1,396 between 2013 and 2017.

In November then health and social care secretary Jeremy Hunt pledged to reduce and end the practice of out-of-area placements by 2020.

He said: “It wouldn’t happen with physical health and we shouldn’t accept it for mental health. That’s why I’m personally committed to ending the practice by 2020.”

But  Ms Keeley said that the government is failing to reduce the number of patients being sent far away from home.

She said: “At the last election, Labour pledged to end out-of-area placements by 2019 and increase investment in NHS mental health services, so that money reaches the front line.”

Labour revealed last month that 1,039 children and teenagers with mental-health problems were sent on out-of-area placements in 2017-18, according to further FOI responses from NHS England. Youngsters from Canterbury in Kent were sent 285 miles to stay for care; those from Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly travelled 258 miles and those from Bristol 243 miles.

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