Nursing and medical director failed to act on suicide risks, court told

A trust’s nursing director and associate medical director should have reduced risk on a mental health inpatient ward by ensuring bin liners were removed, a court has heard.

North East London Foundation Trust and its ward manager Benjamin Aninakwa have been charged with manslaughter by gross negligence concerning the death by suicide of mental health inpatient Alice Figueiredo, who died aged 22 on a NELFT ward in 2015.

Both the trust and the ward manager deny the charges.

Mr Aninakwa failed to remove bin bags from a communal toilet on Hepworth Ward at Goodmayes Hospital in Ilford, jurors heard on Monday, as the prosecution began to make its case. Prosecutors said this meant Ms Figueiredo was repeatedly able to access the plastic bin liners, which she had used in 18 earlier suicide attempts.

Giving the prosecution’s opening statement, Mr Duncan Atkinson KC said: “The failure in the completion and analysis of Datix records, and the failure to issue appropriate guidance to make plastic bags — a recognised means of self-harm generally; and a clear means by which Alice had herself self-harmed — inaccessible to patients like Alice, can be attributed to the senior management through the director of nursing and the associate medical director, amongst others.”

He added: “These failings by the trust and by its senior management were so truly exceptionally bad as to amount to gross negligence.”

Read full story (paywalled)

Source: HSJ, 4 November 2024