A survey of mental health trusts across England has found that Bristol doctors use electroshock therapy – a century-old technique in which brain seizures are induced in mental health patients – more often than anywhere else in England. UK ECT Improving Standards Campaign Group commissioned the audit of NHS trusts, using freedom of information (FOI) requests to obtain data on how often medics applied controversial electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression, mania or schizophrenia.
This named Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP) as the most frequent user of ECT, employing it 47 times more often than the least frequent user, Liverpool-based Mersey Care. Medics at AWP treated 169 people using ECT in 2019, or 94 people per million residents within its catchment area. For Mersey Care the figure was just two people per million – a 47-fold difference.
Two ECT teams cover the AWP service area: Linden Unit at Callington Road Hospital in Bristol and Green Lane Hospital in Devizes, Wiltshire. These include doctors and nurses trained in ECT, plus several anaesthetists. In use since the 1930s, ECT involves placing electrodes on the head of a patient and passing an electric current through one or both hemispheres of the brain.
