Patient used security card to leave Birmingham psychiatric hospital
February 6, 2009 3:58 am Fraud, Hospital, News, Psychiatry, Schizophrenia, unhappy patientsFeb 4 2009 Birmingham Post
A mental health patient walked out of a Birmingham psychiatric hospital unchallenged with a door security pass belonging to a member of staff.
But West Midlands Police have revealed that the teenager was only reported missing two days later on Sunday morning.
He had used the swipe card to calmly pass through a number of electronically controlled doors and out of the intensive care unit in Edgbaston on Friday and was finally tracked down in Sparkhill by police on Monday afternoon.
Yesterday, mental health officials said they had launched an urgent investigation into the security blunder at the intensive care inpatient ward at the Oleaster Centre, near Edgbaston’s Queen Elizabeth hospital, which treats a mixture of voluntary patients and those detained under the Mental Health Act.
A source said the card belonged to a member of staff who normally had it secured to a belt. It is not clear whether it was stolen or picked up off the floor after being dropped.
The patient, thought to be in his late teens and suffering schizophrenia, used the card to open several sets of doors to exit the building, the source said.
“He was able to pass through a number of doors with a swipe card that had been stolen from a nurse. He went through three or four doors without being challenged,” said the source. “No one could believe how it happened.”
The teenager was not a danger to the public and categorised as low risk.
Ros Alstead, the Trust’s executive director of nursing, said: “The safety of our patients is paramount and we take any breach of security extremely seriously.
“We have instigated a full and urgent investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident, to ensure that we can prevent reoccurrence and learn from it.”
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