EDP: Revealed: People waiting more than a DAY for emergency mental health treatment

Emily Townsend reports: Patients in mental health crisis are still waiting more than four hours to be seen in an emergency – with the longest delays going beyond an entire day. More than one in four ’emergency referrals’ in Suffolk and Norfolk (26%), were not assessed within four hours in September, according to the trust. […]

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The Guardian: Hundreds of mental health beds needed to end ‘shameful’ out-of-area care

Cuts in mental health beds have gone too far, leading to the “shameful practice” of patients being sent hundreds of miles from home to be treated, according to psychiatrists. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is calling for the NHS to urgently create hundreds of extra beds for people who are seriously mentally unwell in order to tackle

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EDP: ‘It destroys lives’ – Teen’s dismay at 18-month mental health delay

Tom Bristow of the Eastern Daily Press reports: It is a year since inspectors slammed the region’s mental health service for making patients wait too long for help. This week they are back. Has anything changed? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Chloe Saunders needs help. The 17-year old has been trying to

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EDP: Improving figures, but mental health campaigners say more needs to be done or ‘expect more deaths’

Donna-Louise Bishop of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Campaigners for better mental health provisions say more needs to be done to protect the regions’s most vulnerable patients from being sent hundreds of miles away for treatment. It comes following a meeting of the board of directors for Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT), in

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EADT: Revealed: Harrowing stories of mental health patients highlighted ahead of under-fire trust’s inspection

Jake Foxford of the East Anglian Daily Times reports: Hundreds of damning stories from mental health patients in Suffolk will be considered in the next inspection of the region’s struggling NHS trust. The Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (NSFT) will soon be inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) after being rated inadequate three times

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EDP: Revealed: How mental health patients are being sent to failing private hospital

Geraldine Scott of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (NSFT) sent 21 patients to Kneesworth House, in Royston, over the last year and on Tuesday it was revealed how Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors found dirty wards and “uncaring and disrespectful” staff at Hertfordshire unit, as well as Priory Hospital Blandford

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EDP: Is this in the public interest? Man who attempted suicide in hospital car park is taken to court

Peter Walsh of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Campaigners have criticised a decision to prosecute a man experiencing mental health problems who lay down in front of vehicles at a Norfolk hospital in an attempt to kill himself. The 40-year-old man, who we have decided not to name, lay down in front of two buses

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EDP: ‘The system is broken’ – emergency mental health 999 incidents double

Dominic Gilbert of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Urgent mental health-related incidents attended by police officers have almost doubled in four years as pressures on the 999 service grow. Coinciding with the ‘radical redesign’ and ruthless cuts to mental health community, crisis and home treatment teams and beds; the closure of assertive outreach and homeless

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EADT: Mental health trust ‘sorry’ after Ipswich unit was forced to close beds

Emily Townsend of the East Anglian Daily Times reports: Campaigners are warning that mental health services in Suffolk and Norfolk are in “meltdown” after a unit caring for people with learning disabilities was temporarily unable to admit new patients. Six inpatient beds at Walker Close, Ipswich’s Adult Learning Disability Service, had to close to new

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EDP: Children and young people with mental ill health ‘slipped through the net’ as staff were forced to make own waiting lists

Geraldine Scott of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Staff working in children and young people’s mental health were forced to make their own waiting lists as official data was so inaccurate and cases “slipped through the net”. Those were the findings of a report into services provided by the region’s mental health trust when inspectors

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BBC News: Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust ‘did not update GP’

BBC News reports: A mental health trust treating a 15-year-old girl with anorexia failed to keep in touch with her GP or keep full records, a report states. Again. Ellie Long, 15, was found hanged in her room in Wymondham, Norfolk, in 2017. While the managers of Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) play

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EDP: Woman saw 25 mental health professionals in 14 months before her death, coroner’s report reveals

Geraldine Scott of the Eastern Daily Press reports: A coroner has issued a warning over the death of a young woman who saw more than 25 members of the region’s mental health crisis team in the 14 months before she took her own life. We’ve been talking about the lack of any focus from Norfolk

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BBC News: Mental health trust’s out-of-area placements hit record levels

The BBC reports: A troubled mental health trust is sending record numbers of people far from home for treatment, figures show. Some Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust patients are being cared for hundreds of miles away because local beds are unavailable. The number of bed days for out-of-area placements in April 2019 was 1,911,

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Audio: BBC Radio Norfolk: Campaign spokesperson interviewed by Nick Conrad about Beds Crisis and Mental Health Meltdown at NSFT

For those who missed this interview on BBC Radio Norfolk, you can now listen by clicking on the audio bar below:

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Video: BBC Look East: NSFT let down Thomas and Katherine Kemp

Revealing reporting, yet again, from the award-winning Health Correspondent of BBC Look East, Nikki Fox. Disgracefully, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust’s Board and senior management refused to be interviewed by the BBC about two preventable deaths. What a fine friend the young couple had in Dorian Goldsmith.

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Research: NSFT featured anonymously in prestigious Journal of Management Studies

The salary of more than £150,000 per year paid by Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) to its Director of Research without a PhD appears to have finally paid off. NSFT’s management has been featured anonymously in a leading business journal, Journal of Management Studies. You can read the fascinating article by Mats Alvesson

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EDP Front Page: Mental health patients in ‘acute distress’ STILL sent miles away five years after pledge to end practice

Geraldine Scott of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Scores of mental health patients in “acute distress” were sent out of Norfolk and Suffolk for care – despite five years of promises that the practice would end. With services bursting at the seams, 82 people from the two counties were shipped away from their homes and

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Disastrous NSFT Chief Executive Antek Lejk ousted

Marie Gabriel, the new Chair of Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT), doesn’t mess about. Antek Lejk should never have been appointed in the first place with his track record and against the wishes of service users and carers. As commissioner, Antek Lejk starved NSFT of funds. As Chief Executive, Antek Lejk led the

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EDP: Campaigners ask where mental health nurses will come from under new GP surgery plan

Geraldine Scott of the Eastern Daily Press reports: Concerns have been raised over where mental health nurses to be placed in doctors’ surgeries are going to come from amid a shortage in the profession. A £500,000 review into Norfolk and Waveney’s health system identified that 127 mental health staff would be needed to work in

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The Guardian: Nuwan Dissanayaka: Jamie is psychotic and won’t go outside. Mental health services are failing him

This article from Nuwan Dissanayaka needs to be read by everybody with an interest in mental health. Dr. Dissanayaka is really worth following on Twitter. We’re delighted Nuwan’s views are getting wider attention in the national press. Dr. Dissanayaka is the consultant psychiatrist in the Assertive Outreach team in Leeds. Of course, assertive outreach at

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