The information is not available in the form requested. The available data are collected on the numbers of mental health and learning disability secure unit beds in national health service units, and do not include independent sector beds. The data are not broken down by establishment.
Data on the average daily number of mental health secure unit beds, and learning disability secure unit beds in NHS units in England over the last ten years are set out in the following table.
1997-98 1998-99 1999-2000 2000-01 2001-02 Available mental illness 1,921 1,747 1,882 1,952 1,848 Occupancy mental illness 1,566 1,578 1,750 1,792 1,699 Available learning disability 439 422 404 431 407 Occupancy learning disability 404 326 359 408 381
2002-03 2003-04 2004-05 2005-06 2006-07 Available mental illness 2,064 2,569 2,696 2,807 2,993 Occupancy mental illness 1,867 2,378 2,472 2,545 2,722 Available learning disability 508 514 503 526 516 Occupancy learning disability 482 470 484 502 489 1 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’. Source: Department of Health Dataset KH031.
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 used for this data collection. This means that the figures above mainly show the numbers in high and medium secure mental health services in NHS units. These figures also only show NHS beds and not those commissioned by the NHS and provided by independent sector providers.