HSE was warned over lack of secure facility beds

AS TWO doctors were last night treated in hospital after being stabbed by a psychiatric patient in Limerick, it has emerged that the Health Service Executive was forewarned by experts there would be “tragic, violent consequences” of a lack of secure psychiatry beds at a psychiatric facility only last month.

Four consultant psychiatrists wrote to the HSE days before the violent murder of Michael Hughes in Dublin in December. In the letter they wrote that the absence of secure psychiatry beds would result in denial of treatment to patients, enormous risk to their families and similar, possibly fatal, risks to staff in existing, low-security facilities.

“There will also be risk to the public with the real possibility of tragedies such as those seen in the Britain,” it said.