West Lane Hospital: Staff concerns 'ignored' at Middlesbrough site

A whistleblower at a mental health trust criticised over the deaths of three teenagers has said bosses ignored workers when they raised concerns.

Christie Harnett and Nadia Sharif, both 17, and Emily Moore, 18, who were friends, all took their own lives within eight months of each other.

The whistleblower said agency workers fell asleep on duty at Middlesbrough's West Lane Hospital and staff struggled "to keep children alive".

The trust has apologised for failings.

Reports into the women's care found 120 failings at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV), which ran the hospital, and other agencies.

West Lane, which closed in 2019 following the deaths, provided specialist child and adolescent mental health services, including treatment for eating disorders.

Miss Harnett, from Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, took her own life at West Lane Hospital in June 2019 and Miss Sharif, from Middlesbrough, died there two months later.

Miss Moore took her own life in February 2020 at Lanchester Road Hospital. She had previously been treated at West Lane.

Speaking after the reports were published, the health trust worker, who did not wish to be identified, told the BBC staff were "ignored" when they tried to warn bosses about conditions in the hospital.

"Staff repeatedly raised concerns with managers, some of the time we just didn't have enough staff to keep the children safe," the worker said.

"We warned them something serious was going to happen, but they just ignored us.

"Senior managers looked at numbers, rather than the skillset that staff actually had.

"The agency staff would sometimes fall asleep on duty or watch the telly rather than engage with patients."

The whistleblower also recalled how one patient banged their head against a wall for 40 minutes because there were not enough staff to help or restrain them.

They said: "In the end we weren't properly able to look after the children, we were just trying to keep them alive.

"Some [staff] at West Lane were confronted and abused when they went outside.

"The abuse on social media was horrendous. People said we should die, we should be shot.

"We got no support from the trust in dealing with this. They would just say we were safely staffed when we weren't."

Marjorie Wallace CBE, chief executive of mental health charity Sane, said: "These are some of the most shocking, heart-breaking and damning reports I have read in many years.

"Despite warnings from the Care Quality Commission and others, lessons appear to have not been learned.

"We understand the pressures that trusts, particularly those providing children and adolescent mental health services, are under with the overwhelming increase in numbers of young people referred for help, understaffing, low morale and lack of beds and units.

"But this should not prevent psychiatric units providing safe treatment and care or responding to the many red flags that were clearly evident in all three of these cases, including repeated self-harm and suicide attempts."

Gemma Byrne, campaigns manager for Mind, said the young women were "tragically let down at their most unwell by the very services that were supposed to help them".

"When a young person is in a mental health hospital, they should at the very least expect to be kept safe and be treated with care, compassion, and dignity. Sadly, this is too often not the case," she said.

The girls' families have called for a public inquiry.

Brent Kilmurray, who became chief executive of TEWV in 2021, said he wanted staff to feel as if they were supported by senior management.

He outlined ways workers could raise concerns about safety anonymously, and said they would take that "incredibly seriously" and would "act on it".

"We accept in full the recommendations made in the reports - in fact the overwhelming majority of them have already been addressed by us where applicable to our services," he said.

"It is clear from the reports that no single individual or group of individuals were solely to blame - it was a failure of our systems with tragic consequences."

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