Who has a duty of care for patients sectioned under the Mental Health Act?

Laura Preston, a clinical negligence solicitor at Slater and Gordon Lawyers, discusses who is responsible for the well being of someone sectioned under the mental health act, and the steps you may take if a loved one comes to harm whilst under the care of the state.

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Transcript:

If a patient is sectioned under the Mental Health Act then it's no longer their family or their personal responsibility to take care of their well-being because somebody has made a decision that they're not able to do that for themselves and so that responsibility transfers to the hospital or the mental health unit that they have been sectioned within and that unit then has a very serious responsibility to that person and they are being looked after by the state essentially so it's very important that obviously those patients are protected because they're so vulnerable.
Often the people that we're dealing with when mental healthcare has gone wrong have been let down by the service in some way and usually that's where communication has fallen down and a patient who's very vulnerable might not have received the care that they need.
The first thing to do I think is to speak to the people who've been treating your loved one or family member to find out who was responsible for their care and to ask whether or not you can make a complaint, or whether they have investigated anything themselves around why that patient has come to some harm.
Often that process has been started already by the care provider, so by the hospital or by the mental health unit, and if it hasn't then you can ask for that process to be started and they should conduct an internal investigation if that's appropriate.
If a patient is fatally harmed or injured and able to commit suicide whilst they're sectioned because of a failing in the medical care then any inquest that takes place has to look at whether or not their human rights were breached by their ability to lose their life whilst in medical care. And that means that the inquest looks into various questions and has to make a decision on whether there was any neglect or gross neglect that resulted in their death. So the inquests are a good opportunity for families to get answers in a very traumatic time we would get involved with the investigation and take over from the family member so that they were relieved of that activity and also so that we could ask all the necessary questions and if there was an inquest that needed to be attended then we would gather all the evidence for that inquest and represent the family there.

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