To think he should be fired, at the very least? TRIGGER WARNING SUICIDE

[BBCNewsRave]

Young woman killed herself after trying to get mental health help...

"Mandy Park’s distraught pleas were not only ignored by a mental health worker – but ridiculed.
Her daughter Hannah Groves was labelled an “attention seeker” and a “f*ing waste of space”.
Hours later she was found dead at home"
...
"The Health Care Professions Council ruled the insults about Hannah were ­“undoubtedly spoken” but failed to prove the case against a named social ­worker."

I don't understand. If the insults were definitely spoken then why aren't they firing the social worker? In fact I think they should be given many, many hours of community service and never allowed to work in a professional role again. These people ruin lives, they should be punished severely.

I know I'm not the only one here whos experienced this kind of mistreatment, but for it to go to court and still let this evil person near vulnerable people - WTF?

(Another linky.)

[NotStoppedAllDay]

Er no. They save far far more lives than they (allegedly) 'ruin'!!!

[MichaelSheensNextDW]

There are arseholes in every occupation. Sadly the consequences in healthcare can be enormous.

Years ago in a nursing setting I witnessed a male nurse bitching about a female patient during a team tea break. The patient had suffered a post partum DVT and ended up having a leg amputated. He was doing pisstaking impressions of her crying while he changed the dressings and called her a "fucking stupid attention seeking tart".

It was one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen and I made a formal complaint to our line manager.

I was told it wouldn't be going anywhere because the nurse had a relative undergoing chemotherapy and so 'wasn't himself'.

In the contemporary NHS there is little to no decent clinical supervision, mentoring or investment in people. Compassion fatigue is very real, very damaging to both HCP and patients, and sadly in most cases, preventable.

[MarcelineTheVampire]

Draylon I completely agree with you about the funding and the NHS being on its knees etc, but the fact is that not all social workers/HCPs are nice people and this social worker seemingly lacked total empathy for someone clearly suffering from a mental health crisis - he called her a 'fucking waste of space'.

I am very sympathetic to the overstretched NHS and the HCP workers within it- mistakes are easily made when so overworked but this is not about a 'mistake' this is about speaking horrifically about someone who clearly needed help.

Every time an issue with teachers and/or HCP are raised on MN there is always at least one poster who claims 'oh but they are overworked' - sometimes these people are twats, people have experienced it directly, don't minimise their experience.

[MarcelineTheVampire]

MichaelSheen completely agree with you!!!

[BBCNewsRave]

I feel I'm wasting valuable oxygen buy being alive. And clean water. I can't have anything for myself because anything other than helping others seems too selfish, but I cant help others because I can;t even earn money to look after myself. Our society is wrecked, we won't have any NHS or anything left, and unlike previous generations or other countries where this is the case, we don't have community either. There is nothing to live for. I can't bear it.

[RonaldMcDonald]

Unfortunately some people are attention seeking
Some are manipulative, some dishonest in how ill they are or how real the threat is
She may have been both/any of these things on many occasions - she might not
Some people are behaving in a devastating fashion because of their illnesses and their family and HCPs are utterly terrified that their actions will end in a completed suicide

I am so sorry for this young woman and her family AND for all the HCPs that she dealt with over the years of her illness - they will also all be reliving moment by moment and decision by decision the actions they took and moves they made

The idea that mh is clear cut if so far from the truth.
It is unfortunate that the hcp didn't take that threat seriously but her actions did not end Hannah's life. Hannah did.

[NotStoppedAllDay]

Of course our society isn't wrecked!!

It's horrible that he commented on the girl in that way, but it's one person!

Life does indeed go on

[MichaelSheensNextDW]

BBCNewsRave
I'm sorry you're feeling so low tonight. We're living in unsettling times and I'm sending you a hug.

[MarcelineTheVampire]

BBC please know that whilst there indeed are terrible things happening in society, there are also wonderful things happening too...I'm sorry you are feeling so low, sending lots of hugs and

[MichaelSheensNextDW]

I note this event took place at the notorious Southern Health Trust which was running the unit where 18 year old Connor Sparrowhawk died after suffering a seizure in the bath.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37221250
It was clearly a toxic organisational culture and took an unseemly long time for the Chief Exec to do the decent thing and leave.

[Kimby2109]

in the summer last year i was going through a really though time. anyway to make a long story short i needed up taking 40 of my antidepressant pills. i called the ambulance a few moments after i realised what i had done.
i was alone and scared and taken to A&E.
well when i got there i was put in a small room and left for hours.
When they were signing a nurse to come in and take my details and put my band on etc i heard them talking outside. One particular nasty healthcare professional turned around and said thats boring i don't want to deal with her she's a waste of space.
Anyway many more things went on from the staff playing a game to see who would come into see me to the doctor telling me after i pointed out i could hear them all telling me we don't talk about patients and then going outside and saying by the way she can hear us talk louder to them taking the mickey out of what i was wearing and even laughing when the psychiatrist came to speak to me.
When the shifts were handed over in the morning i heard them all talking about what a waste of time i was and one of the nurses screaming outside my room no wonder we have no money with people like that using up our resources and the senior doctor on shift saying well thank her for having a crisis on our shift and get her out.
Anyway they did me a favour as i was determined to get better after that incident, but others would have killed themselves over that.
Its effected me in really bad ways. Even to the point i broke a bone in my foot at xmas and refused to go to hospital despite the pain.

[BBCNewsRave]

Ronald Maybe people wouldn't have to stress the suicidal feelings they have if they could get help before they were about to die? I know when I was younger I stressed the point that I was thinking about suicide because I was incredulous that they wouldn't help and thought they must have misunderstood - I didn't realise you had to be inches away from death before it counted as "suicidal".

Also - how is that supposed to work then? Surely if you're 100% definitely going to kill yourself, you won't be tootling off to the hospital for help? So - if you ask for help, it proves you're not 100% ging to do it, so no help for you; whereas if you are 100% certain, well you won't ask for help and you'll be dead. How does anyone get help for suicidal feelings? This is a genuine question btw!

[prh47bridge]

If the insults were definitely spoken then why aren't they firing the social worker

The words were spoken at a time when the night staff were handing over to the day staff. The HCPC found that the social worker who was reported was one of a number of people who could have said the words. Their conclusion was that the words were definitely spoken but it is impossible to prove who said those words. On balance the HCPC disciplinary panel thought it was not the social worker that had been reported to them.

So the reason the social worker has not been struck off or disciplined by the HCPC is that, although somebody definitely said these words, they thought it was probably not him but one of the other people present at the time.

[BBCNewsRave]

Bloody hell Kimby, how horrific. I'm so sorry you went through that. How can such people work in "caring" professions?

I would love to make some kind of undercover documentary about this sort of thing, but the logistics are virtually impossible.

[BBCNewsRave]

Thanks for the clarification prh

[Topseyt]

It was a CAMHS worker who told my DD3 that she was an attention seeker. She waited apparently until I was out of the room and she was interviewing DD alone. DD3 was 11 at the time and didn't tell me for some weeks.

Sadly, I now know of at least one other girl, a few years older than my DD3 (actually a close friend of my DD1) who was given similar "treatment" by the same CAMHS worker, who was then the one allocated to their school.

Yes, of course funding cuts are real, but it is only part of the picture because it is lack of empathy rather than funding that makes some people unempathetic arseholes.

We pretty quickly stopped going to CAMHS. DD3 was better and happier without them. There were some decent people there, but we didn't get one and the others were too thinly spread so the service was shit.

[WayfaringStranger]

I've been in so many roles in mental health. I was a service user for many years. I was a mental health professional. I now care for someone with mental ill health. Anyway, I feel I have a well rounded view of both professionals and services spanning across a couple of decades.

Some mental health professionals are excellent, some are good, some are average and some are poor but not negligent. There are some who are negligent and downright dangerous and this cannot be denied. I believe they are in the minority. However, I have seen good practitioners behave in ways that are not good due to being pushed to breaking point. This is not to excuse bad practice. I am horrified but sadly, unsurprised, by what I hear from patients and families. I have noticed that compassion fatigue (a genuine 'thing') is a massive problem in mental health workers. It's a problem in other areas of health and social care but my personal and professional experience is that MH workers experience compassion fatigue at higher levels. I wonder if it's the high level of risk. That said, it's absolutely unacceptable not to recognise when you're struggling in your job. As a professional, you have a duty to be fit to practice. Sadly, my experience of saying "help, I can't cope with my high case load, it's affecting my own health" was met with "tough shit". This has spanned across multiple areas of mental health work under various managers.

This case has been spoken about a lot in my SW social media circles. It's generated a lot of debate. Whereas there are (and always have been) poor practitioners, the system is under more pressure than ever.

[acquiescence]

bbc agreed. That sort of attitude should result in job loss. I was just guessing that there was not sufficient evidence for this to happen, as I have heard people lose their jobs for far lesser things.

Someone should quit their job before they become as jaded and lacking in compassion as this person did, however often they don't or can't and the stressful situations they are put under, often because of cuts, leads to a lack of compassion and 'burn out'.

Some examples of what I have dealt with directly or indirectly in this line of work: a patient smashed every pane of glass in the ward where I was working, I have to maintain the safety of 23 other patients by getting them into the garden, many were very unwell/survival/psychotic themselves. Police took half an hour to attend as mental health wards are not a priority - we had 4 staff on to manage this. We had to restrain the man who smashed the glass to maintain safety.
I have had a patient cut her femoral artery in front of me because soctors would not prescribe the medication she wanted. She told me it was all my fault and that she would make sure I lost my job.
I had a patient push past me to escape the ward when I was pregnant. I was pushed into the wall and fell to the floor.
My husband was punched to the floor and badly beaten up. The police encouraged him to press charges but it resulted in nothing. I have been forced to accept a patient onto the ward in the middle of the night with no bed to accommodate them. If something happened it would be on my back as I was nurse in charge.
I have been forced to discharge many many patients when they are not tell, still suicidal, without sufficient community support. The resources are simply not there.

I have also worked with many people who I simply could not help, medication could not make them better, therapy could not make them better. It is so sad and such hard work. The overwhelming majority of my colleagues are good and compassionate people who are pushed to the absolute limit by this horrendous Tory scum government.

[DJBaggySmalls]

How can there not be enough evidence when the inquiry agreed he did say those things?

[acquiescence]

baggysmalls read prh post up the page, it clarifies it.

[AwaywiththePixies27]

I don't understand. If the insults were definitely spoken then why aren't they firing the social worker?

Some people appear to have friends in high places are just like that and it's horrible. Literally every 'professional' who dismissed my DSs suicidal thoughts as 'attention seeking' (on paper) are still in their jobs, and that's child centred!

Personally, although I know the cuts have a huge impact, in my own opinion it's not a crutch for some people who haven't done their jobs properly to be able to hide behind.

Poor girl.

[alltouchedout]

Given that the hcpc will take pretty harsh action for far more minor breaches if they can evidence them, I think it's pretty clear that whilst the words were spoken, there is no evidence as to who said them and that the hcpc did not believe, once they had investigated, that they were said by the social worker.
You can read records of past hcpc hearings here: www.hpc-uk.org/complaints/hearings/archive/index.asp?startrow=61