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Care Opinion

Discrimination By Diagnosis.

Posted By RHA040282

"Discrimination By Diagnosis."

About: Rampton Hospital

(as a service user),

Since the Personality Disorder (PD) directorate was the DSPD unit, I feel that patients diagnosed with personality disorder have always been treated as second class citizens. When it comes to 'who get the money' or 'who gets the staff', the PD directorate always seems to miss out. 

There seems to be a culture at Rampton within some staff groups that, as 'PD's are bad & not mad', they don't deserve as much care or attention. This attitude results in patients loosing out on activities, programmes & opportunities.

This weekend, staff from the PD day centre (CRB) have started to work across the site, providing activities for patients in the other carestreams. This move has resulted in PD patients receiving a dramatic reduction in their weekend timetable. A new timetable has been introduced, but was only brought-in on Friday evening - too late for any patient input. 

Rampton currently has an issue with getting enough patients interested in taking part in involvement groups. This is due to the fact that patients feel that these groups are just a 'tick-box exercise', ran by management to satisfy a licencing requirement, with patients having no real say on anything.

Case-in-point, this new timetable. The previous weekend timetable, which has been in place for years, was co-authored by patients. The new one has had no patient input whatsoever. It's simply been thrust upon us.

The weekend is a stressful time for patients. With no meetings or therapy sessions planned, many patients are at a loss what to do. The thing that helps them get through the weekend is the possibility of activities. The possibility of getting of their ward and seeing their friends and associates. The possibility of being able to unwind at CRB in front of a DVD with a bottle of pop. The possibility of experiencing the closest thing they have to freedom - walking in the sun around Westfield. 

We understand that other directorates need activities too. That's why they have their own staff! If their staff don't want to work weekends etc. then that's something management need to look at. Moving our staff, who do an amazing job & are much valued by the patients, is simple not ok. 

We're fed up of loosing out simple because another service is struggling. PD's are patients too. We deserve to be treated with the same care, compassion and understanding that a mentally ill patient would expect.

Too long has there been this culture of discrimination by diagnosis. It's about time PDs receive parity with other services. To many of us, our weekend activities are sacrosanct. We do not give them up willingly. 

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Responses

Response from John Muldoon, Interim TES Service Manager PD/MH, The Peaks, Rampton Hospital 2 weeks ago
John Muldoon
Interim TES Service Manager PD/MH, The Peaks,
Rampton Hospital

Submitted on 16/05/2024 at 17:13
Published on Care Opinion on 17/05/2024 at 09:32

Thank you very much for raising these concerns about the recent introduction of collaborative working across Rampton Hospital at the weekend. This initiative came about following a previous Care Opinion Post regarding the lack of activities over a Bank Holiday weekend earlier this year.

There are times when particular Day Units don’t have enough staff on duty to deliver activities, due to factors such as vacancies and other unavailabilities (annual leave, sickness etc.). The thinking behind collaborative working was that by pooling staff, areas with a shortfall would receive a fair and equitable service across all care streams, whilst we are recruiting to our current Technical Instructor vacancies.

One of the consequences of this approach is that there will inevitably be a reduction in activities in some areas used to a busy activity programme, so some services will be seen to gain and others to lose the level of activity. We fully appreciate that this will cause frustration and disappointment to patients in the care streams that receive less on certain weekends. The importance of weekend activity to enable patients to meet friends from other wards in a social and leisure context is vitally important and as a hospital wide service, TES makes every endeavour to ensure that activities are delivered to all patients.

There has been a delay in our ability to recruit to vacancies in the past few months due to a change in the process around recruitment, due in part to some financial constraints across the Trust. Fortunately, this situation has improved somewhat and we are busy getting job adverts out on TRAC to improve our ability to deliver a quality out of hours service across all care streams.

Following feedback from patients, TES staff and nursing colleagues, we have reviewed our collaborative working initiative and have decided to revert back to the model whereby individual care streams are responsible for delivering an activity programme to their patient group. It should be noted however, that there will be some weekends where little or no activity will occur in some care streams due to staff shortages related to the reasons cited above. We are attempting to address this by improving rostering, the balance of rosters etc. however where vacancies still exist we will explore the option of requesting support from nursing colleagues where possible.

I hope that this allays some of your concerns and thank you once again for bringing this to our attention.

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by RHA040282 (a service user)

I clicked on the "This response is helpful" button above. But now I find that the response written above is meaningless.

There was a timetable in place for the weekend - sent to wards at the end of the week. As of the Saturday morning, a number of changes were made to this timetable, without any prior discussion with patients.They are as follows:-

1. Westfields AM turned into Westfield with Mental Health (limiting the number of PD patients who can attend).

2. Main Rec Hall social on Saturday afternoon for PH & MH has become Main Rec Hall social for MH/LD (meaning no afternoon activity for PD).

3. Evening social or film has been set as social by staff from main hospital.

4. The band 3 staff member can no longer run any activities on their own - as has been done (successfully) for years. This is likely to reduce the number of activities which can be run at weekends and on evenings.

At the time of writing, I am unsure what changes have been made to the Sunday timetable.

Please stop taking our staff. We need these activities. I need these activities

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