I worked for several decades as an NHS Consultant Psychiatrist in precisely the kind of Community Mental Health Team that was meant to be looking after Valdo Calocane, and so I can report from my direct clinical experience, that this new report is basically a whitewash. It turns somersaults to avoid brutal truth, which is that all the failings of this particular mental health trust are in fact rampant all across the NHS.
I left the NHS and moved into independent practice precisely because I became too frightened at how dangerous the abject response to mental illness the system offers, which I will not dignify with the word ‘care’.
If the report actually spoke the truth, it would identify that NHS psychiatry flops all across the nation, it is not fit for purpose, and that it is therefore inevitable that more seriously mentally ill patients will be neglected, and so, tragically, entirely innocent members of the public will become victims of meaningless violence as a direct result. The deeper tragedy is that even serious mental illness of the kind Calocane suffered from, is eminently treatable.
Remediable to the extent of returning those who suffer even from paranoid schizophrenia, back to mental health and functioning, safe members of society.
For example, the report kept referring to Calocane’s care coordinator. After several decades of working in the NHS at the front line, I still have no idea what that is – what are the basic qualifications of a care coordinator?
A care coordinator is not a doctor nor necessarily a nurse and the term is just a way of disguising if you are seriously mentally ill you will not see a doctor nor even a nurse nor will you get to go to a hospital – instead you will be seen in a hut by people who have basically no qualifications (that I recognise) at all – that is the brutal truth and that is why this terrible lethal outcome is going to happen again and again to innocent people.
But Calocane was also seen by psychiatrists – he was sectioned under the mental health act four times – so the care he received from them was also desperately wanting. The report as far as I can see, doesn’t detail how much time those clinicians spent actually seeing the patient.
From my experience all that psychiatrists do in the NHS is rather than actually seeing patients, instead they sit in pointless meetings discussing which unqualified member of staff is going to go out and not make contact with the patient that has been lost to follow up, but at least the system reasons it can document that it did try to find them.
Another bit of the whitewash of this report is that NHS mental health services are fragmented into a multiplicity of different teams, and Calocane, like all the NHS mental health patients are just passed constantly from pillar to post between all these different teams, so on one gets to know them over a sustained period of time which is absolutely vital for anyone to receive decent care.
I also notice that no one seems to have got the sack, yet again, in another NHS scandal. This review revealed that other patients under the care of the same trust – some of whom had SINCE been discharged – had also perpetrated acts of “serious violence” across 15 incidents between 2019 and 2023.
Dr Raj Persaud worked in the NHS as a psychiatrist from 1988 to 2010. He now works privately in Harley Street