We invited Ashish Joshi, Sky News health correspondent, to our King George Hospital A&E to witness firsthand the pressures our staff experience caring for mental health patients. You can watch the full report on Sky’s website.

In the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in mental health patients coming to our A&Es, which are not fit-for-purpose to provide the best environment for them while they face long waits to be moved to a service which can better care for them.

In April, almost 400 mental health patients visited our A&Es, 236 of them at King George Hospital. The average wait they faced for appropriate care was 19 hours.

Matthew Trainer, our Chief Executive, said:

What we’re seeing every day is more and more people coming here as their first port of call.

If you get someone who’s really distressed, who’s perhaps experiencing psychosis, I’m seeing increasing number of complaints from other patients and their families about the environment they’ve had to wait in.

They’re not blaming the mental health patients for being here, but what they’re saying is, being in a really busy A&E with somebody who’s highly distressed and you’re sat there with an elderly relative or a sick child, it’s hard for everyone. There’s no blame in this. It’s something we’ve got to work together to try to fix.

Asish also spoke to Joe Blair, security coordinator, and Emer Szczygiel (pictured above speaking to Ashish), our lead nurse for emergency care. Emer explained how our teams have to balance risk when caring for mental health patients. She said:

If a patient is in crisis and wants to harm themselves, there’s lots of things in this area that you can harm yourself with.

So it’s trying to balance that risk because A&Es are not purpose built for mental health patients.

Commenting on the report on Friday (6 June), Health Secretary and Ilford North MP Wes Streeting said:

I saw Sky’s report and what they’ve shone a spotlight on is not just in my local hospitals but what I’ve seen in hospitals right across the country. There’s far too many people turning up in busy, noisy, crowded A&E departments not because they needed to be in A&E but because the support they needed, the right care in the right place, wasn’t available at the right time and that’s particularly true for mental health patients.

In fact, I can scarcely remember a visit to an emergency department where there wasn’t at least one, and sometimes as many as four, police officers or security guards having to deal with someone going through mental health crisis because the support wasn’t there.

That’s why with our urgent and emergency care plan we’re making sure we’ve got dedicated mental health assessment centres. This means that people who are experiencing or are on the brink of mental health crisis receive an appropriate assessment in the right environment, because, often if you’re going into A&E on the brink of a mental health crisis when you walk through the door, chances are those busy, noisy, scary environments will trigger you into a crisis while you’re there.