The chief executive of a troubled mental health trust is resigning following claims that patients were being abused at a care facility.
Neil Thwaite has announced he will be stepping down from the top job at Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust (GMMH). The news comes after months of independent and internal investigations into the trust's operations.
Staff who were unequipped to be in senior management, a ‘combative management’ style, and a trust ‘believing its own propaganda’ were listed among reasons for shocking staff behaviour towards patients at the Edenfield Centre, ‘exposed’ by a BBC Panorama programme.
The Edenfield Centre is in the grounds of the former Prestwich Hospital and was the subject of a BBC Panorama programme that claims patients were abused. In the weeks following the episode, 30 staff were facing disciplinary action and a dozen were sacked soon after, the Manchester Evening News understands.
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Mr Thwaite became CEO of the huge trust in 2018 and will continue as CEO for the next few months, serving out full notice whilst the trust commences recruitment arrangements. GMMH is a sweeping organisation and provide large swathes of mental health care for residents of Greater Manchester both in and out of hospital.
Neil commented: “Following the awful failings highlighted at Edenfield and other challenges, the last six months have been incredibly difficult for everyone and through engaging with staff, service users, carers and stakeholders, we have worked on our plan to get the organisation on the right path for recovery.
“Now we have launched our Improvement Plan, which will be implemented over the next two years, I feel this is the right time to hand over the reins to a new CEO. The plan strengthens our approach to ensure the safety of our service users and staff, ensuring high quality care.”
Some staff were filmed by an undercover Panorama reporter embedded in the unit from March to June of last year. The footage in the one-hour programme, aired in September, captured apparent humiliation, verbal abuse, mocking and assault of patients - plus alleged falsification of medical paperwork.
A patient called Joanna was filmed apparently being pinched twice by a member of staff, and, against the rules, three male patients are found in one room watching porn, it is claimed. A member of staff was apparently filmed having a nap on a wall during her shift.
The trust commissioned the Good Governance Institute to conduct a review of systems and processes within the Edenfield Centre and across the trust in the wake of the Panorama programme, under the heading 'why did we not know?'
“Edenfield became its own world,” investigators from the Good Governance Institute told leaders of Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust (GMMH) at a board meeting on March 27. Over a period of years, the centre became ‘closed to external influence’, breeding an ‘Edenfield management style’ that was ‘combative’ with other parts of the trust.
Beyond the troubled centre itself, the independent reviewers came up with a host of reasons why the centre had been allowed to decline so far despite being part of what was seen to be a successful organisation. Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust was receiving sustained positive feedback from health watchdogs, including the Care Quality Commission, and was put in a position of trust in the region.
However, the Good Governance Institute found that the trust prioritised growth and positive external judgements as signs of success, instead of being ‘spurred to be self-critical’. Matters were made worse by data being reported to executive board members in a ‘highly aggregated way’, meaning there was no indication of areas of concern and not enough detail needed to know where to change staffing levels, for example.
Unsafe levels of staffing is a hallmark of the trust, according to the Good Governance summary - and often went unchecked as ‘when standards of safe staffing became problematic, they were not appropriately monitored, allowing normalisation of lower than acceptable standards, placing undue pressure on staff and reliance on temporary fixes’.
The chair of the trust, Rupert Nichols, resigned in November after 'inexcusable behaviour and examples of unacceptable care' were 'exposed' at a mental health unit, he said. Later that month, the Manchester Evening News revealed that NHS England placed GMMH in the Recovery Support Programme, the 'equivalent to the former special measures', according to multiple senior NHS sources.
Bill McCarthy, who stepped in as the trust's new Chair, said: “Neil is a compassionate, visible leader in our organisation and across our system and I have enjoyed working with him during the last four months. I know many of you have met or worked with him over the years and I am sure you will all join me in wishing Neil well for his future."
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