- Police are braced to investigate a ‘Winterbourne View’-type scandal in Greater Manchester
- Staff suspended as TV documentary expected to include allegations of patients being abused
Police are braced to investigate a ‘Winterbourne View’-level scandal in Greater Manchester, with a TV documentary expected to include allegations of serious patient abuse.
Yesterday, the Manchester Evening News reported that BBC Panorama have contacted Greater Manchester Mental Health Foundation Trust after an undercover reporter collected evidence of mistreatment at the trust’s medium-secure Edenfield Centre in Prestwich.
Well-placed sources have now told HSJ the allegations include “serious abuse” of adult patients, which they said were at a “similar sort of level as Winterbourne View”. The sources said the trust has already suspended a number of staff, although the trust refused to confirm this had happened.
The documentary has yet to be aired, but police are also aware of the allegations and are preparing to open an investigation.
Winterbourne View was an NHS and local authority-commissioned hospital located in south Gloucestershire. A Panorama team exposed a catalogue of physical and psychological abuse of patients in 2011. The scandal sparked a surge of whistleblowing concerns about units around the country, and prompted a major national programme to move patients with learning disabilities and/or autism into community-based care.
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Source: Health Service Journal, 22 September 2022
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