MP demands: How could this York hospital close with just five days' notice?

Bootham Park Hospital in York shut in September 2015 after inspectors found the facility’s water was scalding hot, mentally ill patients had access to electrical wires and scissors, and a leaking toilet was putting people at risk of Legionella.

Staff from the Care Quality Commission assessing the hospital even witnessed falling masonry on one visit while patients are said to have struggled immensley with the sudden upheaval of moving to other hospitals, some as far away as Middlesborough.

Now York Central MP Rachael Maskell is demanding information on how the system came to ‘fail patients’ to severely.

Speaking during a debate in the House of Commons, she told the Conservatives Minister for Community and Social Care Alistair Burt, that it had taken months to get the case heard before the Government.

She said: “The reason I am so vexed is that four months have passed and nothing has been done about the system. Lives remain at risk, were such events to happen elsewhere. My constituents ask me, and I ask myself: is it because we are in the north? Is it because it is mental health?”

The chaotic closure is in part due to changes of governance of mental health services following the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act in 2012, according to the Labour politician.

She believes the Government’s removal of the Department for Health having ultimate respsonsibility for services means when problems began to arise there is no overarching body to take control and issues spiral.

She told the Yorkshire Post that removing the Secretary of State as a figure to lean on led to the full closure of the hospital, but she said there could have been scope to keep certain wards open.

She challenged Mr Burt during the debate on whether the Government is ‘too proud’ to admit the Health and Social Care Act has created a riskier governance system, as ‘before 2012 there was someone who made such decisions’.

She said: “I know that the circumstances at Bootham Park are exceptional and I trust that this will not happen again, but it could. The lives of my constituents were put at risk, and harm to their health occurred. The system failed them.

“That is why I and my constituents are focused on the need for a fully independent strategic investigation. Through my work and the health overview and scrutiny committee’s processes and now their operational local review, issues have come to the surface, but an independent review must occur.

“Lessons must be learnt of the failures in the way that health bodies relate to one another, and the problems that there are with governance. My constituents deserve to have answers.”

Mr Burt said that he was not aware there had been a request for a round table discussion with clinicians and politicians over the hospital’s closure, but said he was available to meet and had been in regular contact with MPs over the issue.