I thought that I’d seen the absolute worst that Britain’s National Health Service could be both because of my own and my families experiences with the NHS and from reading others accounts of piss poor treatment or service from the NHS. Sadly I was wrong. There are much further depths that the NHS can plumb as this story below shows.

As many will know the NHS’s mental health services are often not just bad but could reasonably be described as appalling. In this case a man who had no choice but to support the sectioning under the Mental Health Act of his daughter found out that his daughter was being physically abused whilst in mental health custody by NHS staff. He and the rest of the family made a complaint about the way his daughter was being treated as anyone would do. The response that the NHS made was to make a false complaint about the father that he was sexually abusing his daughter.

Yes this is ‘our’ NHS. It’s an organisation that will have no qualms about inventing serious accusations against complainers in order to protect both the NHS itself and NHS staff. Britons really are not hating on the NHS nearly enough.

“NHS UNIT INVENTS ABUSE CLAIMS AGAINST GRIEVING FATHER

A father takes his 14 year old daughter to an

@NHS mental health unit because she is desperately ill. Weeks later the same unit is accusing him of sexually abusing her. That is what happened to Richard, whose real name the

@BBC withheld, when his daughter Sophie was admitted to the St Aubyn Centre in Colchester in February 2015 with severe OCD, an eating disorder and treatment resistant depression. She was sectioned soon after.

In January 2016 Sophie was tube-fed while pinned down on her back, vomiting almost continuously, and was later found to have salmonella. Weeks after that a carer allegedly assaulted her during a dispute over a water jug.

The family complained. Shortly after they complained, a senior staff member filed a safeguarding referral accusing Richard of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and domestic violence. Richard says there was malice, without any doubt.

He was accused of secret trysts with his own daughter and inappropriately touching her. He was named as a risk to his wife. He was even accused of making a pass at a male staff member. Eight boxes were ticked on the form covering harms including sexual abuse, concealed pregnancy and domestic violence. None of it was true. All of it was written down and passed between agencies as fact.

The paperwork got him ordered to leave his own home. His younger daughter, 14 at the time, was given a pregnancy test without her consent, because staff had misread the family’s closeness as something sinister. Richard was eventually cleared. Police found no evidence of anything. A parenting assessment found no evidence of inappropriate behaviour. He got an apology. He got compensation. He also got a permanent reminder of what happens when an institution treats a complaint as a threat and a safeguarding form as a weapon.

A report by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman criticised the unit and two other organisations involved. The centre is run by Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust

@EPUTNHS, the same trust now at the centre of the Lampard Inquiry

@LampardInquiry into more than 2,000 mental health deaths in Essex.!

Link to original source

https://x.com/ArturNadol7566/status/2078540688732397880