The father of a 23-year-old man who died after neglect at a Priory hospital is calling for a criminal investigation into a second Priory facility where three young women died in 2022.
Richard Caseby said the Priory should be investigated and prosecuted after three patients died within two months of each other at the Priory’s Cheadle Royal hospital, near Manchester.
“The Priory is a fundamentally dangerous company, one that persistently refuses to learn from its mistakes and neglect. The roll call of death and disgrace at its hospitals just gets longer,” Caseby said.
The deaths are not thought to be linked, and the women died in different circumstances at the institution.
Mental health blogger Beth Matthews, 26, died in March 2022 after swallowing a poisonous substance she ordered online, despite the fact she was not supposed to be allowed to open her own post.
An inquest jury found her death was “contributed to by neglect” by the Priory. Her parents said she was “tragically let down” by the company and her death was “wholly avoidable”.
Lauren Bridges, 20, died at the hospital in February 2022 in a “cry for help due to a lack of family contact” after being moved 250 miles away from her family in Dorset.
Deseree Fitzpatrick, 30, died on 23 January in the same year, four days after being admitted, after being given an “inappropriate” combination of medication that caused significant sedation and suppression of her protective gag reflex.
Caseby, who successfully campaigned for the company to be prosecuted over his son’s death, said the Priory “should be investigated and prosecuted again”.
“Private providers like the Priory suck £2bn from the NHS and UK taxpayers, and yet standards of care are appalling,” he said. “Whenever there are failings and neglect, the Priory’s reflex response is aggressive denial.”
Priory Healthcare was prosecuted over the death of Caseby’s son, Matthew Caseby, who died after absconding from the Priory hospital Woodbourne in Birmingham.
He jumped over a low fence in September 2020 while left unattended in a courtyard and was hit by a train.
An inquest jury found Matthew’s death was “contributed to by neglect” by the Priory, and after a prosecution by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the company was fined £650,000, the largest criminal penalty it has ever received.
The CQC rated the Priory Cheadle Royal’s child and adolescent mental health service “inadequate” in 2023, finding there was not enough nursing and medical staff with basic training to keep people safe from avoidable harm.
The Priory’s chief executive, Rebekah Cresswell, said she “disputed the factual accuracy of many aspects of that report”.
A report later that year rated the hospital overall as “requires improvement” but downgraded it to “inadequate” for safety.
A spokesperson for the Priory said: “The three deaths in early 2022, although extremely tragic, are completely unconnected and happened on three separate wards offering different clinical services. They have been subject to our own internal investigations and inquests, and have been reported on extensively.
The spokesperson added that Priory was “regulated in the same way as the NHS and other independent providers and 84.3% of our services are rated good or better by regulators, which is above the national average”.
A spokesperson for the Care Quality Commission said: “We are not currently investigating Cheadle Royal hospital with regards to criminal prosecution. However, services at the hospital are subject to ongoing monitoring. We can inspect at any time should we have evidence that people are at risk and have a range of enforcement powers we can use if required.”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
• This article was amended on 25 April 2024 to remove some personal details.
