'We knew somebody would die': Teenage patients 'ignored' before fatal NHS trust failures

ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleDominic Hughes,Health correspondentandLesley Hitchen,Health producerBBCLaura Kenny has disturbing memories of the years she spent at a Middlesbrough mental health unit "We knew somebody would die… and nobody listened." Laura Kenny is remembering her friend Christie Harnett. Both were patients at a mental health unit in Middlesbrough when Christie took her own life. Laura says she and other patients had expressed worries about their treatment at the unit - later described in an independent report as "chaotic and unsafe" - but she says nobody listened. Warning: This article contains distressing details and references to suicide and self-harm "We'd been warning everyone," says Laura. "We wrote letters to everyone we could think of saying one of us is going to die." In fact, 17-year-old Christie was one of three young women who, within a few months of each other, took their own lives while patients in hospitals run by the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV) - which covers the whole of North Yorkshire, County Durham and Teesside. In recent weeks we have spoken to more than a dozen former patients, admitted as young people or as adults, who say they experienced failures in the standard of care at TEWV. We have also met the families of some of those who died away from hospital, but still under the trust's care. Nathan Evison was 19 when he killed himself in 2019 and Laurent McNamara died last year. All have similar stories - describing a lack of compassion among staff and an absence of any meaningful treatment or therapy. Many fear mistakes are still being made. Those we spoke to, and hundreds more, pushed for a public inquiry. One was announced last December, but families and patients are disappointed by delays in setting it up. Despite having been promised answers by the end of February, they say a meeting on 31 March with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) left them no nearer to knowing who might lead the investigation, when it might start and where it might be held. "While our clients appreciate these things take time, they are worried about the continued care being offered by a trust under scrutiny and how, in three months, there appears to be no firm developments," Alistair Smith, from Ison Harrison Solicitors told the BBC. The DHSC says it is working "at pace" to confirm who should chair the inquiry. "We are committed to ensuring the voices of patients and the families affected by failures [at TEWV] are at the heart of this inquiry," said a spokesperson in a statement to the BBC. There has already been one independent inquiry into the trust's treatment of young people admitted to hospital with a mental health problem. Commissioned by NHS England, it published its main report in 2023. In particular, it looked at Christie's death, as well as those of two other young women - 17-year-old Nadia Sharif, and Emily Moore who was 18. The findings backed up patients' claims of excessive and inappropriate restraint, that staff were told not to intervene in episodes of self-harm, and that failures were tolerated by managers. TEWV then apologised and said significant improvements had been introduced, but bereaved families and former patients fear that, three years on, the lessons from these failures have not been learned, and that vulnerable people have been badly let down. Former patients and bereaved families have told the BBC they welcome the statutory public inquiry, which will be a much more detailed investigation than the previous report, with legal powers to call witnesses, summon documents and a focus on preventing past mistakes from being repeated. But at heart, they say they want to get answers about what went badly wrong at the Trust and to see some measure of justice for those they have lost. TEWV declined to be interviewed and said it would not comment on individual cases. In a statement, Alison Smith, chief executive since last September, said the trust would "co-operate fully with the public inquiry with honesty, openness, humility, grace and kindness". Laura Kenny, now in her 20s and studying law at university, has vivid and disturbing memories of the decade she spent as a patient under the trust's care. From the age of 13, an eating disorder left her dangerously underweight. Her condition quickly spiralled into episodes of self-harm and suicide attempts. During this time, Laura spent a lot of time as an in-patient at West Lane in Middlesbrough, a specialist mental health centre for young people. Her friend, Christie Harnett was also treated there. Laura says staff would react to incidents of self-harm by either shouting at her or Christie, or just ignore what was happening. "Their reaction would be to either leave you for hours headbanging or self-harming, or to just restrain you very quickly to the floor and inject you," she says. "The idea was to sort of just shut you up." Christie's stepfather, Michael, has

'We knew somebody would die': Teenage patients 'ignored' before fatal NHS trust failures

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