John Glen is MP for Salisbury and PPS to the Leader of the Opposition. He was Chief Secretary to the Treasury
It is chillingly dystopian. A 14-year-old girl falls prey to an eating disorder – severe, but treatable. She is one of many.
Yet, when her parents seek medical help, their little girl is transferred to a residential unit many miles from her stable home and loving family.
The girl is strong, upbeat, and determined to recover. Convinced that – with the right professional support – she can do it. Her parents initially willingly entrust her to the care of the NHS. Only after she is admitted to the mental health unit do they learn that family visits are conducted on a draconian basis: strictly scheduled and one visitor at a time.
Free to access harmful content online, with nothing to do all day than stare at a screen and largely cut off from friends, family and everything that anchors her to normality, over the course of time the girl’s mental health spirals downwards to the point where she is put on self-harm watch.
The therapeutic input promised to her doesn’t materialise and she is trapped in a place where hope disappears. Her pleas for more family visits and more time outdoors are denied.
Desperately worried, Mum and Dad are assured that their precious daughter is never left alone but is under the constant watchful care of professionals.
Until, one dreadful day, she is left unsupervised by a new member of staff – an agency worker on his first shift, who had obtained the job with false papers and had never worked in a psychiatric hospital before.
Alone and isolated, in desperation she takes the opportunity to self-harm – and subsequently dies two days later.
When the grim discovery is made, the worker immediately flees the country. Had he failed to grasp the literal life and death responsibility he was shouldering, or was he also a victim of a failing institution, where staff shortage, absence, and inexperience were endemic?
The lost child was called Ruth Szymankiewicz. She left behind a family blindsided and devastated by grief. Her parents, Kate and Mark, live in my constituency of Salisbury.
Shockingly, they were not the mute, uncomprehending victims of a system they did not understand how to challenge. Dr Kate Szymankiewicz, a GP, and Mark Szymankiewicz, a surgeon, are educated, articulate, and deeply familiar with the NHS to which they have both given their entire working lives.
How, I demand to know, was it possible that, not only were Ruth’s loved ones unable to communicate with her, but that such positive, constructive, and well-informed voices were wilfully excluded from her care?
Astonishingly, the system that killed Ruth is one that Kate and Mark still believe can be changed into one that offers hope, support and healing to children and their families. That is why, rather than rail against the horror and cruelty of what happened to their daughter, they have bravely channelled their grief towards the greater good.
Their every instinct is to heal, and, true to that calling, they have worked to prescribe simple but powerful amendments to the Mental Health Bill, including:
- Protecting and strengthening children’s rights to unrestricted family contact.
- Safeguarding against children being placed in inappropriate settings, such as adult wards or far from home.
- Increasing community-based support to prevent unnecessary hospitalisation.
These are amendments that I will be supporting passionately and unequivocally. I will support them for Ruth, and for all the children who will pass through the dark tunnel of eating disorders and mental health crises.
We owe it to them to do all we possibly can to bring them safely home.
In my experience as a constituency MP, it is too often the case that the vital process of illuminating the mistakes and missteps that led to a personal tragedy is made all the more painful by the many smaller procedural injustices that are uncovered along the way.
I will therefore be demanding to know why the Szymankiewicz family have been effectively barred from pursuing legal redress. Ruth was placed in a unit that had already received one unsatisfactory inspection visit. After her death, two further visits were carried out, and the setting was subsequently issued with a warning notice – a step that renders it immune from legal action.
Yet, because the first of the three visits took place when Ruth was still alive, the Care Quality Commission has asserted that the setting was already protected.
How is it possible that the unit was under warning enough to be shielded from prosecution, yet, at the very same time, not sufficiently under warning to consider refusing to admit Ruth as an inpatient because the chronic staff inexperience and lack of shift cover would compromise their ability to keep a vulnerable young girl safe from harm?
