Ministers to ‘slow down’ mental health changes after Valdo Calocane report

The government has told the families of the victims of the Nottingham bombing that it will slow down reforms to mental health services, following a damning report into the treatment Valdo Calocane received in the years before the killings.

Dr Sanjoy Kumar, whose daughter Grace O’Malley-Kumar was one of three people killed in the attacks, said the health minister had told the family that mental health reforms would be slowed.

“Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has promised us that he will slow down the changes to the Mental Health Act,” Kumar told Sky News on Tuesday. “He has promised that we can work with people who work with the law. Change is needed. We need to step back and really look at what is safe for the public.”

In the King’s speech in July, the government unveiled plans to “modernise” the Mental Health Act and give patients “more choice, autonomy, rights and support”.

They include plans to ‘review the detention criteria’ so that people can only be held under the law if they pose a risk of serious harm, and to reduce the period for which they can be held.

The government also said it would strengthen the voice of patients by adding legal weight to their right to be involved in planning their care and to make choices and refusals.

Kumar said he wanted to get the “Mental Health Act right” and that it was “not about taking away people’s liberty”.

“It’s about holding clinicians accountable who put people like that on the street,” he said. “Any psychiatrist who puts a dangerous person on the street should be held accountable for putting that patient on the street if they haven’t done a comprehensive risk assessment. We really hope to work with Wes Streeting, who certainly has the will and the intention to do this right.”

Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, killed O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates in Nottingham in the early hours of June 13 last year. He also seriously injured three other people when he drove a van into pedestrians.

An investigation by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) into the mental health care Calocane received in the years before the murders found there had been “a series of errors, omissions and misjudgments” in his treatment.

These included risk assessments that “minimised or omitted” key details such as the severity of his risk to others, and not choosing to take medication via depot injection, a slow-release form of medication, because he did not take it himself.

Calocane often refused to take medication at home and showed “little understanding or acceptance of his condition”, the CQC said.

The report criticised clinicians for failing to assess whether Calocane was competent to make decisions about his care, saying his symptoms of psychosis “impaired his ability to weigh up the information regarding the need for antipsychotic treatment and the risks of withdrawing it”.

Calocane refused depot injections and therapies and often missed appointments.

Responding to the CQC report, Streeting said: “I want to assure myself and the country that the failings identified in Nottinghamshire are not repeated elsewhere. I expect the findings and recommendations in this report to be considered and implemented across the country so that other families do not experience the unimaginable pain that Barnaby, Grace and Ian’s family are living through.”