BOOTHAM Park mental hospital was shut abruptly with no contingency plan in October. In a personal opinion piece, Mick Hickling argues why it must be re-opened.

The psychiatrist sat knee-to-knee with my wife for the interview. The psychiatrist had a sometimes shaky grasp of English and an odd habit of concluding her remarks with the phrase “is that not it, Janet?” My wife’s name is Jane. Her confusion was compounded by another question from the psychiatrist, “Are you ready for Christmas yet?” It was the middle of August.

I was an onlooker here during our family’s first contact with York’s psychiatric services. It was the Cinderella service of the NHS in those days over 30 years ago and it still is.

Just a few days before we had felt like life’s winners. My wife had given birth to a daughter after three sons. Immediately after the happy event, things took a turn for the worse.

My wife was whisked out of her cosy maternity setting and crash-landed in something which felt at the time like a horror-movie scene. She had had a breakdown and was on a psychiatric ward. The diagnosis was puerperal psychosis.

This is a story that shows how mental illness can strike quite out of the blue. My wife had no history of it. The illness can recur and for us, the inside of Bootham Park hospital (pictured below) has become too familiar over the years.

York Press:

It used to be grim. Because of my wife’s job, she was treated for a later breakdown at the private Retreat mental hospital on the other side of York. Briefly, she had been admitted to Bootham Park, then a taxi ride took us away from conditions more like a dirty hostel for the homeless to a place like a five-star hotel.

Bootham Park has certainly had problems. But it was better than what we have now, which is no NHS mental hospital at all. This must surely be unique for a city of the size and significance of York. I’ll share painful family experiences if they lend weight to the campaign by the Labour MP for York central, Rachael Maskell, to get Bootham Park re-opened.

I visited an inpatient there three months ago and found things had greatly improved.

Two months later it was shut at four days’ notice. Severely ill in-patients were shipped to distant parts, mostly Middlesbrough. Out-patients were left high and dry, no information about where to go or what to do.

Psychiatrists and other staff at the hospital, the city’s GPs and other health professionals, were in the dark. They said so at a meeting for people directly affected called hurriedly by Rachael Maskell and which I attended.

At a later meeting open to the public, we were told by the people responsible for closing Bootham Park it had been ‘hit by the perfect storm’.

Dr Mark Hayes, chief clinical officer of the Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group warned us not to rely on a proposed date of 2019 for a replacement to be ready. Some ‘slippage’ would probably occur on the way to this brave new future.

NHS officials may regard the closure in terms of a natural disaster. But it has happened on their watch and the storm was collectively of their own making.

Having spent much time and effort pondering Bootham Park’s future they produced the worst possible result. The guiding principle had to be that patients’ interests were paramount. But in the chaos that followed closure, their interests came last. They have been put at jeopardy. Sudden change is the worst thing for people with frail mental health. And this was very sudden indeed.

Set against that consideration, the Care Quality Commission’s listing of the building’s deficiencies - the reason why they say they can’t re-register it as a hospital - seem almost laughably trivial.

A woman in the audience at the public meeting gave voice to the human consequences. She described her own mental breakdown and the terror of being transported in a police van to a distant hospital because no bed could be found in her own city. “I was in a cage like an animal and I’m not an animal, I’m a human being,” she said.

There’s also the cost to the public purse of allowing a public asset like Bootham Park to rot. A swift programme of works would allow it re-open, either in a limited way for outpatients, or as a stand-in for the longer term until a new hospital is built. A petition calling for it to be immediately refurbished has been signed by more than 8000 people

In the public meeting, we heard experts insisting what they had done was correct, and not, as most of us in a sceptical audience seemed to think, catastrophic. The clear message to emerge was that the system they represent has failed the people of York.

We must act now to get Bootham Park open again for patients. If the owners of the building, NHS Property Services, can’t or won’t get on with it, I’m sure one of York’s excellent builders could, given the opportunity. Put someone dynamic in charge and the work required could probably be done inside a week.

The wider Bootham Park picture reveals us to be at the mercy of a prodigious and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Up to 2012, some 200 official and government bodies would have had a say in any proposed closure of a place like this.

In that year, a new Health and Social Care Act was passed. It doubled the number of official bodies that must be consulted in these circumstances to over 400.

What a Byzantine process that must be. And here we are at its conclusion with a major hospital shut down almost without notice.

It appears no-one is in a position to hear all the voices of a myriad of NHS bureaucrats - who are separately working to what would appear to be narrow and conflicting remits - and come to a decision in the greater public interest.

Not even, it seems, the Government minister for mental health.

- Mick Hickling is a retired journalist living in York.