Lavorato
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/05/support-worker-at-psychiatric-hospital-where-ruth-szymankiewicz-14-died-had-no-experience-inquest-hears
di DangerousCap2473
Lavorato
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/05/support-worker-at-psychiatric-hospital-where-ruth-szymankiewicz-14-died-had-no-experience-inquest-hears
di DangerousCap2473
11 commenti
So at best hes committed fraud and immigration offences. It should really be manslaughter but thats legally unlikely.
And because the hospital has now closed literally no one will ever face justice.
I’m not surprised. Too many private psychiatric wards leech funding off the NHS and often deliver ridiculously poor quality care.
They often pay these types of staff minimum wage for a job that requires a lot of skills, empathy, and good communication. As a consequence of this, there’s often an overrepresentation of African immigrants in these roles (sometimes 90%+).
Many staff are fantastic and better than an English/British equivalent. But disproportionately to other care areas, many staff are terrible and not appropriate employees for this role.
This is for multiple reasons, including cultural stigma towards mental health patients (e.g., some African countries chain learning disability patients), lack of knowledge and understanding of mental health, and ability to communicate effectively because of language barriers.
Some staff honestly don’t care about delivering good care and support they’re just there to collect a paycheck, often ignoring patients during their shift. Sleeping on the job is a daily (or nightly) experience, and some agency staff are know to book back-to-back shifts. meaning they’re working 24hrs+. This puts patients at risk.
I feel for the girl and family, who’s death was 100% preventable.
The private psychiatric wards seeing patients as a cash cow – should be a national scandal and warrants much further scrutiny.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/01/ghana-chaining-people-mental-health-conditions-persists
This really shouldn’t be a story about immigration. This is just another story about us not caring enough about the treatment our vulnerable children, elderly and mentally unwell get constantly in a system that cares only about either private companies making money, or authorities saving money.
The company involved in running the care home should never be allowed to trade again in healthcare and the managing directors should be facing corporate manslaughter charges. The recruitment agency should also be facing consequences.
It’s gonna sound like a miserable thing to say, but very few people with a working brain are available to do that job. Long hours, not enough coworkers to handle the workload, criminal liability if you screw up is only going to attract competent people if there’s a decent wage. When it’s minimum wage, it’s only the borderline unemployables who apply in the first place. They will be used as the lump of labour to the detriment of patients forever, unless it is made a legal liability to hire them in the first place.
.
Of course, in modern Britain, the wackjob HR team that hired a grossly unsuitable person for a demanding job role with legal requirements for competence will never even be questioned under caution, let alone arrested.
Shameful, but not surprising. As a retired general nurse, we sometimes had psychiatric patients transferred to us when they had physical health needs requiring treatment. Sometimes their mental health needs made it hard to care for them on a general ward, they might be a danger to themselves or others, or at risk of absconding. Often agency staff would be sent to supervise them, on a one to one basis, but the quality was very variable. One patient was considered to be high risk, and so two agency staff were employed. Both settled down in the room, fell asleep, and awoke to find the patient had hanged himself, by squeezing through the window.
Realistically their is no treatment for most serious mental illness. If that was communicated more clearly and we had an honest discussion on that everyone would be in a better place, patients, clinicians and tax payers.
Did I read this right? After this manslaughter, he just flew back out to Ghana and will never face justice?
Mental health care is utterly shit and poorly
funded . With that all said I hope they don’t scapegoat the worker . The problem is we still havnt managed to work out how to treat mental health problems , and this is exacerbated by terrible funding . E-learning / for a child this sick ! . Lord alive . I hope her parents can find some peace in time , her torment is over .
Absolutely disgusting. A loss of life due to poor checks.
It’s not just psychiatric care it’s also vulnerable disability care.
My sister, 34, developmentally disabled since birth, has had two carers a week to help her (and our mum) since last year (4 hours each carer).
The lovely ladies are from Nigeria and Ghana, but sometimes language comprehension is a barrier.
Mum worries that one day, when she’s gone, how my sister will cope with not only being slow in comprehension in English, amongst other things……but how she’ll cope with potential carers from overseas in the future without her supervision.
Oh yeah, and the county council just sent my mum a big care bill despite her being a carer herself and on benefits in a HA property and told she wouldn’t have to worry about the cost 😔
Employers should be held accountable and so should the government.