"A number of kind staff members but many…"

I’ve had two stays in spring view while suffering with extreme mental distress. A number of the staff were very kind caring considerate individuals. Therapy staff in particular treated you the most humanely and like an actual human being which is hugely important to recovery in these situations. I felt the care was often let down by the qualified nurses and doctors behaviours. They failed to listen or make time to actually speak with individuals. Drug errors were made on an almost daily basis in relation to the medications my GP had prescribed me for physical health reasons. Over a two week stay and daily reminders from myself in relation to this the prescription was never corrected. I was regularly five different doses to what was prescribed to and had to repeatedly point this out to the nurses. On one occasion I was even given the wrong tablet completely! Regularly heard nurses speaking to other patients advising them that side effects, which were well known to be caused by the drugs they were handing out, simply didn’t happen. This kind of misleading miss information and medication error is what leads to psychiatric patients struggling to trust healthcare professionals and I feel it should be actively discouraged in order to help foster better therapeutic and trusting relationships.

I would use this mental health unit again in future if required but I feel there is a huge amount of room for improvement to make it safer and kinder to those who use its services. I do pray I never need it again and will avoid inpatient mental health care as much as I possibly can for the rest of my life. Having been forcibly injected on a previous admission I have been left with significant PTSD type symptoms. So although I did need psychiatric help I have found treatments have also left considerable negative effects on my mental health, almost changing the difficulties I was having rather than actually improving them in any meaningful way.