An emergency mental health assessment unit has shut – with patients instead having to wait in accident and emergency.
The Psychiatric Emergency Assessment Referral and Liaison (PEARL) service at Manchester Royal Infirmary provided specialist care for people experiencing a mental health crisis.
Patients in extreme distress could stay overnight with a few beds available for serious cases.
But now the unit has closed, meaning patients will be assessed in A&E instead.
Bosses have denied that it is a cost-cutting move, saying there will be no job losses and workers will instead staff a 24 hour emergency psychiatric assessment service in the casualty department.
Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust says it is now planning a full review of mental health urgent care in the city but any changes would be ‘fully communicated’.
A spokesman said: “Following feedback from service users and carers regarding issues of privacy and dignity in PEARL and the increasing lengths of stay of patients, the existing unit was closed.
“It was replaced with immediate effect by an A&E liaison service staffed by our highly qualified, experienced and professional team.
“We will continue to work with all staff within the A&E department to continually improve the quality of care we offer as well as our responsiveness in a way which enhances the dignity and respect we offer to patients.”
After being assessed, patients could be admitted to the MRI or taken to Wythenshawe or North Manchester General hospitals.
A city-wide service emergency service based in Park House at North Manchester has been given extra beds and resources to cope with the closure, a spokesman added.
Staff there will also answer calls to the emergency 24-hour mental health crisis line, which was previously operated by PEARL.
But Paul Reed, vice chairman of Manchester Users Network, said people across Manchester would lose out.
He said: “It was a service that people could access, people were just getting used to it and now it’s being abolished.
“It will be a disaster for people across the city, but especially those living near the hospital in areas such as Longsight and Levenshulme.
“People will become very frightened about going to a casualty department – it will be very upsetting for them and we are completely opposed to its closure.”
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i agree with Paul Reed , if you are suffering from some sort of mental health crisis ,sitting in a busy casualty department would be a difficult thing to do and hardly does anything for a person privacy or dignity.
The Manchester mental health and social care trust seems to be an organisation in perpetual crisis of one sort or another.Surely other large cities have mental health services that are better than Manchesters, time for some radical changes at the top i think
They are just returning to how it used to be. What's more worrying is the proposed move of all mental health inpatients services to NMGH to create a single unit.
I work at the MRI. There is no story here.
There is a still a designated area of the department that mental health patients can go to should the Triage nurse feel that sitting in the main waiting area would be dangerous (to themselves or others). There are still beds available. That's addressed the main point of this article, so, as far as I'm concerned, there is no more to talk about.
There are still specialist mental health nurses and doctors on hand to deal with cases that the A&E nurse are not trained in.
Paul Reed should be a bit more responsible and no try to instil fear into mental health patients around the MRI area. The A&E staff do a fantastic job. The nurses there, who I know personally, are professional, skilled and always have the patient's interests at heart.
Mental Health patients are difficult to manage if you compare them with someone presenting with a fracture of some kind, but these nurses have the necessary training to deal with it.
MY BROTHER HAS MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES AND TO BE SAT SUROUNDED BY
OTHER PEOPLE WOULD MAKE HIM FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND AS WELL AS
MYSELF. IT IS HARD ENOUGH TO GET HIM TO HOSPITAL WHEN HE IS NOT WELL
AND HAVE TO COME TO TERMS I AM UP AGAINST THIS IS NOT VERY PLEASANT
I ALSO AGREE VERY STRONGLY TO THIS, I HAVE A BROTHER WHO IS MENTALLY ILL AND TO GET HIM TO HOSPITAL IN THE FIRST PLACE IS A TASK, BUT TO THINK
THAT I HAVE TO SIT WITH OTHERS PEOPLE, WHO WILL NOT DOUBT BE STARING
AT HIM WILL MAKE HIM WORSE AND BE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE FOR HIM ALSO.
As issues were around dignity and privacy it probably won't be a great loss. So calling it a disaster might be a bit dramatic.
Maybe the real question is why it opened in the first place when these issues were just as relevant and how much it has cost the poor tax payer.
The worst thing that happened to the mental health (psychiatric) services in Manchester was to combine the NHS side with the Social Services Department in a so called Trust. It is far more effective to have cooperative but separate services than the combined one when there often big differences in outlook between the management of the SS and the health practitioners of the NHS in mental health services. Politics was clearly important here because equally vulnerable populations are present across all NHS services yet no other combined arrangements are common, and part of the politics was probably with an eye to some shift of monetary resources in a particular direction.
All our health services are going "backwards" these changes are not for the health & well being of the poor patient but a money saving exercise.
I know of a patient with mental health problems in need of an intensive care bed having to go to Blackpool Victoria only last week because there was no ICU beds available anywhere the family of this person were distraught. it is a disgrace.