So much for Cameron's determination to protect health services for sick children

[Icimoi]

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/nhs/11262751/Police-fury-about-teenage-girl-held-in-custody-because-no-NHS-beds.html

"A senior police officer says a 16-year-old girl with mental health issues is in police custody because no NHS beds are available in the whole of the country.
Assistant chief constable Paul Netherton, from Devon and Cornwall Police, said she was detained on Thursday night and sectioned on Friday lunchtime.
She should have been taken to hospital, but police were told there were no places for her, he said."

"Earlier this month the Commons health select committee warned that children as young 12 were being held in police cells overnight when suffering a mental health episode because of a lack of services for them.
Last year there were 263 occasions in which children were held in cells while an emergency psychiatric assessment was carried out .
Earlier this year a survey of 600 GPs found that one in five had seen a patient come to harm because they could not get specialist help, with almost half saying the situation had worsened in the last year."

But Cameron says:

“For me, this is personal. I’m someone who’s relied on the NHS and … who knows what it’s like when you go to hospital night after night with a sick child in your arms
How dare they say that I would ever put that at risk for other people’s children."

Apparently it's all right with him to put "other people's children" at risk of being in a situation where the only provision for them when they are seriously ill is a police cell.

But may I suggest that Mr Cameron emotionally brought up his own NHS experiences out of sheer frustration on the lies and hypocrisy of a Labour Party, desperate to show they are good at something, constantly accusing the Conservative coalition of NHS privatisation and mismanagement, when Labour’s own record in the ‘good times’ was not just worse, it was incompetent.

Forget that Labour had no macro economic, or departmental plans in 2010, to pay/ring fence the approximate £100 bil a year the NHS was then spending, or the NHS IT programme wasted several £billion going over budget and produced a bed-pan of a system – how about their plans to pay and provide new doctors for this new New Labour society full of millions of new citizens, in the name of ‘diversity’?

March 2007: “Doctors' training system 'a shambles'”
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1544307/Doctors-training-system-a-shambles.html
“As much as £2 billion has been spent on the training of up to 8,000 doctors who find themselves without a new job under a Government initiative.”

“Such is the fury at the scheme, called Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), that doctors have renamed it "Massive Medical Cull".

“It costs £250,000 to train a doctor and the "shambles" is said to be blighting the careers of dedicated young men and women who may now leave the NHS. Many are also saddled with debts of more than £40,000 after funding their training.”

And what was Labour’s record having inherited in 1997 the fastest growing economy in Europe and budgeting to have NO BUDGET DEFICIT in the early 2000’s?

May 2007; “Blair's legacy: Health”
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4555344.stm
“No government has ever invested more in the health service than Labour under Blair and yet the NHS is mired in deficits with patients taking to the streets to prevent the closure of their local hospitals.”

“Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern, said: "I feel sorry for Blair, but the money has been wasted."

“This seems to be the crux of the issue. The public was promised record amounts of money would flow into the NHS. And so it has.”

“But the problem is it has not necessarily gone where many would expect.”

“Once pay hikes - consultants and GPs have both received lucrative increases - covering for deficits and rising drug costs are taken into account, the 7% budget increases actually equate to about 2% for services, according to the King's Fund.”

”Surveys have repeatedly shown that when asked what they think of the NHS people reply it is in crisis.”

So if Labour keeps the NHS in ‘crisis’ when money is no object, how can they manage it on a tight budget, UNLESS they keep raising a broad range of taxes as a time of a ‘cost of living crisis’ Labour tells us they can miraculously solve – and even then it’s clearly doubtful those taxes will get to the NHS front line?

It will be an argument over funding that is stopping the girl from finding a place

Not necessarily. Numbers of beds in acute MH wards have dropped, to get a bed on an acute ward, you have to be very ill indeed. This leads to beds being blocked, as the clients are simply not able to be discharged into already overstretched community services without severe risks to the client and their carers.

At 16, this young woman also falls into the 2 year age gap between CAMHS and adult health services. CAMHS have a habit (IMEE) of discharging or refusing to see children of 16 and 17 years, and adult services tend not to pick up the slack until a person turns 18.

So, while this might be a question of funding, it's actually a question of the overall underfunding of all MH services in the UK. Even years on from the care in the community act, people with MH problems are 'disappeared' from the public consciousness until someone with MH problems commits a crime of course, and then 'lessons must be learned'. However, as with everything, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and you can't make a properly proactive MH service out of one which is starved of funding to the point where putting out fires is the best that can be expected.