The Irish Examiner View: Reports show value of checks

The Mental Health Commission published three inspection reports yesterday. Two were positive. An Coillín, in Mayo, and Dublin’s Highfield Hospital improved overall compliance, by 10% and 9% , but the third unit — St Michael’s, in the Mercy University Hospital in Cork — saw its compliance rating drop by a substantial, worrying 8%.

These two advances show that inspections, no matter how troublesome, work. It shows that regulation raises the bar for service providers and, all going well, improves the circumstances of those reliant on mental health services. This was not, lest we forget, always the case. Nevertheless, suboptimal services persist, despite a huge shift in cultural expectations around services for mental illnesses over recent decades.