Muckamore: Health Department apologies for 'appalling behaviour'

The Department of Health has apologised once again for the "appalling behaviours" identified at Muckamore Abbey Hospital.

A barrister for the department was addressing the public inquiry into allegations of abuse and neglect there.

The hospital provides facilities for adults with special needs.

It is run by the Belfast Health Trust, with the department responsible for health and social care in Northern Ireland.

On the third day of public hearings, barrister Andrew McGuinness said the department would engage "fully and transparently" with the inquiry.

He outlined the department's response since the first allegations of abuse came to light in 2017.

He said once this was brought to the attention of the department and the existence of CCTV recordings of the incident emerged, the department raised concerns with the Belfast Trust.

Further concerns emerged following retrospective viewing of CCTV footage.

This led the Belfast Health Trust to commission a serious adverse incident investigation which ultimately found that seriously vulnerable people had been let down.

Another independent review panel report published in August 2020 found a "clear failure of care" which resulted in harm to patients.

Mr McGuinness told the hearing: "Whilst it does not seek to gainstay any police investigation or the work of this inquiry, the department wish to take this opportunity to once again publicly apologise for the appalling behaviours identified in the two reports to date and to accept that the findings of the reports reflected practices that fell well short of what is acceptable."

The hearing was also told of measures that have been put in place by the Belfast Health Trust to try and prevent similar incidents.

They include CCTV in all wards, day care and the swimming pool, contemporaneous viewing of footage selected at random, and a reduction in the use of seclusion for patients.

The scale of the inquiry was made clear when Mr McGuinness told the hearing that the department had uncovered and catalogued 72,000 documents which may be relevant to the inquiry.

He said the department stood ready to cooperate and assist the inquiry in any way it could and welcomed the difficult questions which were likely to come.

A lawyer for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Mark Robinson QC, also outlined the scale of the police investigations, with officers trawling through 300,000 hours of CCTV footage in what is the UK's largest adult safeguarding investigation.

More than 70 staff have already been suspended - some face criminal charges and the case is due before the courts again next week.

That led Mr Robinson to stress there must be no risk to the criminal justice process as the inquiry progresses.

On Thursday, the Belfast Health Trust and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority will address the inquiry for the first time, as will lawyers representing some of the families involved.