Nottingham attack could have been prevented if NHS ‘had done its job’, says Health Secretary

The Health Secretary said there “could still be three innocent people alive” if the NHS had “done its job” in treating Valdo Calocane in the years leading up to the Nottingham attacks.

Wes Streeting said the deaths of Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates “could have been prevented if the NHS had been there when it was needed”.

He said: “The hard truth here – which I think is hard for the whole country to hear, let alone me – is that if the NHS had done its job, if there had not been multiple fundamental failings, three innocent people could still be alive.

“That’s why I completely understand why (the victims’ families) accused the NHS of having blood on their hands.”

A Care Quality Commission (CQC) investigation into the mental health care Calocane received in the years before the murders found “a series of errors, omissions and misjudgments” in his treatment, which Streeting said were “deeply distressing”.

Dr Sanjoy Kumar, Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s father, said it was “devastating” to read, and that Streeting had told him the government would “slow down” mental health reforms in light of the findings so that families could be involved in the new laws.

In the King’s Speech in July, the government announced plans to “modernise” the Mental Health Act, which applies to England and Wales, to give patients “greater choice, autonomy, rights and support”.

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

“(Streeting) has promised that we can work with people who work with the law,” Kumar told Sky News on Tuesday. “There needs to be a change. We need to step back and really look at what is safe for the public.”

“It’s not about taking away people’s freedom. It’s about holding clinicians accountable who put these people on the street.”

Mental health charities called for opposition to the delay in the new legislation, but said public safety must be considered as well as patients’ rights.

Marjorie Wallace, CEO of Sane, said: “We don’t want to delay the reforms that our own charities and other charities have fought so hard for.

“However, cases such as that of Valdo Calocane highlight the need to balance the rights of potentially very disturbed patients at risk of harming themselves and others with those of their families and the wider public.”

Brian Dow, deputy director of Rethink Mental Illness, said “we cannot afford to delay reform any longer” but that the new legislation “must be carefully considered”.

“This will involve a reflection on how we balance the need for people with mental illness to have a choice in their treatment with the importance of ensuring the safety of the public,” he said.

Calocane, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, killed O’Malley-Kumar, Webber and 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.

The CQC investigation found that risk assessments had “minimised or omitted” important details, such as the severity of Calocane’s risk to others, and that clinicians could have chosen to medicate him using a slow-release form of medication, depot injection, as he often refused to take oral medication at home.

Calocane showed “little understanding or acceptance of his condition”, refused depot injections and therapies and frequently missed appointments, 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”.

Streeting said he wanted to reform the Mental Health Act in a way that would strike the “right balance between recognising that there are people whose freedoms are being taken away today and who could live safely in the community, but also recognising that for others there needs to be much better and closer supervision so that people like Calocane are not out on the streets causing risks or deaths to others”.