UK NHS beds crisis impacts mentally ill kids
The UK’s NHS crisis deepens as the National Health Service orders new emergency procedures for mentally ill children.
The NHS crisis intensified this weekend as hospitals were advised to admit young mental health patients to adult wards because of an acute national shortage of places for children and adolescents.
The NHS instructions that were leaked to the Observer state that the shortage of beds for young mental health patients is now so serious that 16- and 17-year-olds, who should be admitted to specialist child adolescent mental health facilities, are likely instead to be admitted to adult wards.
The Mental Health Act 1983 stipulates that 16- and 17-year-olds should only be admitted to adult wards in a “crisis situation” and for a short period, or where a patient is nearly 18 and the adult ward has appropriate specialist services.
Labour’s shadow minister for public health, Luciana Berger, described the situation as “utterly appalling” and blamed the crisis on £50 million of cuts to children’s mental health services since 2010, the Guardian reported.
Now former British lawmaker Derek Conway believes: “The problem is demand has increased enormously and is now a political question whether or not even more money needs to be spent, or whether we need to readjust what we expect as free from the service.”
Conway told Press TV’s UK Desk that “there is a lot of bureaucracy and duplication in the National Health Service. In Britain the care for the elderly and vulnerable people is dealt with by local authorities by the council bureaucracy. And the care for the sick people is dealt with by the National Health Service.”
HRK/GHN
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