Mental Health Bill [Lords]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Of course, we do not want to see young children treated in adult wards, but nor do we want to put clinicians into a kind of legal straitjacket that could have the wholly unintended result that a young person in desperate need of care is turned away because a child bed or a child ward is not available for them. In my view, we need to focus on continuing to improve the services we provide for children and adolescents rather than believe that simply making changes to the law will solve the problem. At the heart of the Bill are the provisions in chapter 4 for supervised community treatment. When the current law was introduced, the focus of care for people with the most serious mental health problems was in hospital, and the use of compulsion meant detention, and sometimes forced treatment, in hospital. Modern medicine and clinical practice has shifted the whole focus of care into the community and the law needs to follow. The Bill would, therefore, enable a patient who is detained in hospital to be released under supervised community treatment, enabling some patients to be discharged into the community earlier than would otherwise be the case—a real benefit for them and, often, for their carers, too. Those provisions, of course, are designed particularly for the so-called ““revolving door patients””—people who are hospitalised, whether under compulsion or voluntarily, who respond to treatment, who are released, and who then fail to maintain their treatment, producing another crisis and yet another hospitalisation. That pattern features all too often when someone who has been in contact with mental health services takes their own life—some 1,300 people a year. The same is also true in many of the far smaller number of cases—about 50 a year—when someone else dies at the hands of a mental health patient. We will probably never be able to prevent every such death, but supervised community treatment is essential to help ensure that patients who have been discharged from hospital continue with their treatment in the community, helping to keep them well and thereby helping to protect them, their families and the wider public.