'FIRST DO NO HARM'

The time has come for me to share the story of my fraught journey through NHS mental healthcare services in Basingstoke over the last several years while advocating as a single dad to a mentally ill daughter. That journey has brought me, quite literally, to the edge of a precipice and, if not for a convoluted alignment of chance and fate, might have carried me over the edge.

My daughter and I have, variously between us, been abused and neglected by those whose professional duty it is to care. We have both been harmed, and continue to be harmed due to incompetence, ignorance, casual indifference and sometimes wilful intent by healthcare clinicians and leadership staff working, primarily, within two NHS Trusts serving the Basingstoke area.

While this story revolves around my daughter and her specific mental health needs, this could very well be your story too. According to NHS England, ‘One in four adults experience at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any given year. People in all walks of life can be affected at any point in their lives. Mental health problems represent the largest single cause of disability in the UK’.

We all know that the NHS is beset with problems. Retired senior consultant and former non-executive NHS Trust director, Charles Godden tells the ‘warts and all’ story of the ‘creeping decline’ of the NHS best in his book, ‘Not In The Best Of Health’. Underfunding and political interference undermines the NHS but so too does bad management. And what happens when healthcare professionals cause physical and mental harm because of the poor standard of care they give you? This is usually referred to as clinical negligence.

The ’do no harm’ principle is one of the ethical cornerstones for medical professionals working within the NHS and can be interpreted in two ways, the first being as errors as an act of omission and the second as being as errors as an act of commission. I will demonstrate through the telling of my story that both my daughter and I were harmed according to both interpretations of this aphorism.

I will tell my story with unabashed honesty, according to evidence-based facts, naming those clinicians and leadership staff responsible for clinical negligence and outlining, in detail, the multitudinous failures to follow guidelines and protocols. I will identify all instances where I rely solely on opinion or conjecture, especially when referring to conspiracy and corruption.

The clinician patient relationship is built, primarily, on trust. The patient should have confidence in the clinicians competency and a firm belief that the clinician will strictly adhere to the principles and values enshrined within the NHS Constitution. Trust often takes years to develop but is sometimes destroyed in a moment. This is particularly an issue for those who have significant trust issues resulting from adverse childhood experiences, social injustice and outright betrayal and abandonment. I was abandoned with less care and concern than some people abandon dogs, abandoned and maligned by the individual clinicians and the wider healthcare institutions they work for, by each of the NHS Foundation TRUSTS charged with my wellbeing. That abandonment and that malignment irrevocably undermined my confidence and faith in the NHS at both individual and institutional levels, hence ‘Trust Issues’ becomes the title of my social media campaign.

My story begins with an account of the circumstances leading to a suicide attempt by me in April, 2022, outlining events that funnelled me into a veritable cesspit of depression and despair. The title of that account, 'Four And Twenty Dead Crows', might seem odd to the new reader but was chosen by me with much deliberation and purpose and I will explain its meaning at the end of the twenty-fourth post.

During June, 2022, I gained access to a portion of my medical records held by Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust. Revelations contained in those records were truly shocking and marked my change of attitude from one of passive acceptance into assertive repudiation. The story of my investigation, the struggle to hold individuals and institutions to account and the extremes I went through in order to get the psychiatric help that both my daughter and I deserved are told in the sequels 'A Murder of Conspirators' and 'Just Caws'.

I hope this story has a happy ending.

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you become a regular visitor to my pages and please do invite others to follow my story.