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Mental Health Services: Greater London

Volume 461: debated on Monday 11 June 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many secure places there are for psychiatric patients in London hospitals; and how many there were in each year between 2004 and 2006. (137020)

The data collected record the number of mental health and learning disability secure unit beds in national health service units, not the number of psychiatric secure unit beds.

The following table shows the average daily number of available secure unit beds, both mental illness and learning disability secure unit beds, in NHS organisations in London between 2003-04 and 2005-06.

Average daily number of available secure unit beds, NHS organisations in London, 2003-04 to 2005-06

2003-04

2004-05

2005-06

Organisation

Mental illness

Learning disability

Mental illness

Learning disability

Mental illness

Learning disability

Total for London

800

17

831

17

823

16

Central and North West London Mental Health NHS Trust

69

0

75

0

75

0

West London Mental Health NHS Trust

176

0

175

0

175

0

Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust

135

0

157

0

184

0

Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust

26

0

17

0

24

0

East London and the City Mental Health NHS Trust

95

0

112

0

138

0

Oxleas NHS Trust

84

0

84

0

84

0

South London and Maudsley NHS Trust

114

17

114

17

46

16

South West London and St. George's Mental Health NHS Trust

101

0

97

0

97

0

Source: Department of Health form KH03.

Note that these beds are from mental health providers in the London area, so they may not all be available for residents in London. There may be beds outside the London area that are used for residents within London. This can be due to the placement needs of individuals.

The source for these figures is the 'Department of Health Dataset KH03' and the definitions for the purposes of this collection are as follows.

These figures do not represent the full level of secure services available to the NHS. Low secure mental health services are not consistently defined and may well fall outside the definitions below. This means that the figures above mainly show the numbers in high and medium secure mental health services in NHS units. These figures also show NHS beds only and not those commissioned by the NHS and provided by independent sector providers.

The definitions of mental health and learning disability secure unit beds, for the purposes of the KH03 annual beds collection, are:

Mental illness—other ages, secure unit

An age group intended of National Code 8 ‘Any age’, a broad patient group code of National Code 5 ‘Patients with mental illness’ and a clinical care intensity of National Code 51 ‘for intensive care: specially designated ward for patients needing containment and more intensive management. This is not to be confused with intensive nursing where a patient may require one to one nursing while on a standard ward’.

Learning disabilities—other ages, secure unit

An age group intended of National Code 8 ‘Any age’, a broad patient group code of National Code 6 ‘Patients with learning difficulties’ and a clinical care intensity of National Code 61 ‘designated or interim secure unit’.

From the data dictionary at:

www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/datadictionary/data_dicionary/messages/central_returns/hospital_aggregated_statistics/kh03/kh03_3_fr.asp