The “difficult decision” to temporarily close a children’s mental health unit in Sussex has been officially confirmed by the NHS trust which runs the facility.<\/p>\n
Chalkhill Hospital, an inpatient unit on the grounds of the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, caters for those aged 12-18 with acute mental health needs.<\/p>\n
Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the 16-bed facility, cites “a number of reasons” for the closure which it decided upon internally last month.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson said: “It relates to feedback from the CQC, as well as the need to undertake environmental improvements and recruit to the senior clinical role on the ward.”<\/p>\n
The trust said: “We have also taken the decision to give us time to work with children, young people and families to review and improve the model of care we provide at Chalkhill.<\/p>\n
“It is the right time to do this given we recently launched a new Crisis and Intensive Home Treatment Service to prevent the need for hospital admission where possible.”<\/p>\n
The CQC, whose report from a recent inspection of the unit is yet to be published, said it did not wish to comment.<\/p>\n
While appearing before the East Sussex County Council health overview and scrutiny committee last month, trust chief operating officer John Child said the intention was to close “over three months”.<\/p>\n
He said: “We wanted to make sure that the young people who are currently receiving in-person care, their care was not going to be disrupted, and we would support them to leave hospital in the normal way, rather than be transferred to another in-patient service.”<\/p>\n
Mr Child said positive steps had been taken since a CQC inspection in 2023 which rated the facility as ‘requires improvement’, including increasing the number of young people receiving care and the timeliness of admissions.<\/p>\n
He said there were a number of reasons for the closure, but “primarily” there was concern about an inability to sustain the necessary improvements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The “difficult decision” to temporarily close a children’s mental health unit in Sussex has been officially confirmed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-188583","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}