WHAT a shame that the men’s Westerdale Ward at Clifton Park Hospital has closed because qualified staff are not interested in working there (The Press, June 27).

In the past, this low-secure unit provided an exceptional quality of care for those with mental health problems, placed there for their own safety as well as for the safety of the general public, before being discharged back into the community.

A new low-secure unit for women has recently been completed next door, while the men stay in what remains of the old Clifton Psychiatric Hospital, which can hardly be considered fit for purpose. Both are administered by the Leeds and York Partnership Trust.

The Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys Trust, commissioned to provide mental health care in our area, is on track to provide a brilliant new state of the art hospital in Haxby Road within a couple of years, while those who might have come into contact with the criminal justice system and might have been looked after in Westerdale are denied help.

This cannot be right and calls into question the current division of responsibilities at Government level between those who might have come before the courts and the rest of us, but who can have equally severe mental health problems.

Amalgamation of these two aspects of mental health provision is long overdue, but hampered by inter-departmental squabbling.

How many heads have to be knocked together before this is resolved, in what looks like another Bootham Park fiasco?

Philip Crowe, Clifton, York