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Is there a need to safeguard specialist psychiatric units in the NHS? Henderson Hospital: a case in point

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Bridget Dolan  and
Kingsley Norton
Bridget Dolan
Affiliation:
Henderson Hospital, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5LT, and Section of Forensic Psychiatry, St George's Hospital Medical School, London SW17
Kingsley Norton
Affiliation:
Henderson Hospital, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5LT, and Section of Forensic Psychiatry, St George's Hospital Medical School, London SW17
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For the purpose of this article, a specialist psychiatric unit refers to any community project, out-patient clinic, hospital ward or, as in the case of Henderson, a whole hospital which specialises in providing a specific type of treatment or treatment to a particular patient group(s). Specialist psychiatric units may be particularly vulnerable at this time when, because of the implications of Working for Patients, many psychiatrists' minds are focused on the need to justify and define their ‘core services’. Many specialist psychiatric units are directly funded by their hosting Region. If Regional Health Authorities do not maintain special psychiatric units directly then a high financial risk will be put on any District Health Authority or self-governing hospital which hosts them. If the latter fail to accept the financial risk, or take the risk and then suffer financially, there is the possibility that both a wealth of specialist expertise will be lost from the psychiatric profession as a whole and that certain patients will receive substandard or no treatment. It may be, therefore, that there is now a need specifically to justify the continued existence of specialist psychiatric units. Henderson Hospital, a therapeutic community specialising in the treatment of severely personality disordered young adults, is a case in point.

Type
Article
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , February 1990 , pp. 72 - 76
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1990

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