York’s mental health practitioners are reported in your pages to be shocked and angry at the closure of a new life-changing and desperately-needed provision (Mental health service to shut, October 12), the Primary Care Mental Health Service. The chop comes after just ten months. Lack of funding is the reason.
If that shock and anger was expressed in the community something might be done. Sufferers from mental illness need this sort of front-line service. So readers should protest to the funders - the Vale of York Clinical Commissioning group - and to City of York Council and their MP.
The overall picture was already grim. Nationally the number of beds available to mental health patients has fallen by 13 percent in six years. Here the system is still struggling to come to terms with the abrupt closure of Bootham Park Hospital. No-one carried the can for that debacle - the 2012 Social Care Act bequeathed a bewildering national system that handily serves to cover the trails of failing NHS bureaucrats.
It’s the distressed and the damaged who take the hit. And it will happen again unless we now re-think our financial priorities.
Mick Hickling,
Clifton Dale, York
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