‘The ward seemed like a prison’: How my girl was crushed by a health service meant to help her
I recall vividly the moment it dawned on me that the psychiatric unit where my young girl was being treated felt like scarcely better than a secure facility.
Ruth had been completely trusting. So had we. That everything shifted the day she was relocated from our nearby medical center to the psychiatric unit at the mental health center in the county.
When we departed, she walked peacefully down to the patient transport with me and the therapeutic specialist – who held her close and said goodbye.
When the transport door opened at the other end, the stark building loomed over us. We were greeted and led up a set of steps and through the double, air-locked, doors, one shutting firmly behind us, the staff member waiting for the first mechanism to secure before accessing the following entry.
We entered a totally secured unit that was devoid of daylight, with my eyes quickly hurting from the harsh overhead lighting. They guided us to a central room that was fully windowed – what staff termed the “monitoring zone”.
The Painful Separation
I felt her grasp cling to me as they announced my exit was necessary. My protest about not meeting staff was answered with the regulation that “guardians must leave the unit.”
I asked a second time, and they agreed I could see her room, only briefly, but then I had to leave immediately. It was hospital policy.
I still wake at night, heart pounding as I relive those moments through the common room, to Ruth’s allocated room. A individual bed, a plastic side table. Windows that did not open.
Their voices became faint as they described how a changing caregivers would watch Ruth around the clock. I placed her luggage on the ground. Ruth remained seated on the bed, obviously scared, before I was ushered from the room.
In an instant, I was confined outside the air-locked entrances, holding a document that restricted my time with my daughter to only a single hour, two times per week.
How could I have consented to this?
A Tragic Loss
{Our daughter, our child, passed away on Valentine’s Day 2022 at 18.29 on the pediatric critical care ward at John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. She was transferred urgently from Huntercombe hospital, an NHS commissioned but privately run child and adolescent mental health unit, where she had been not prevented from fatal self-injury previously.|Our beloved daughter passed away on the 14th of February, 2022 at evening in the {pediatric intensive care unit|
