Correspondence from Petitioners to Committee, 3 January 2013

To the petition committee, National Assembly for Wales,

Thank you for letting me have a look at the Minister's respond. 

As there is no reference to previous letters from the petitioners, I wonder whether she has read them.

The Nice  Quality Standards are quite clear and I wonder why the minister is so shy to implement them now.

To rely on the law only can have severe limitations.

She is referring to the care and treatment plans in the Mental Health Measure. Although it is acknowledged that there are many areas of life that need to be considered, In the end it is only a minimum of one area required to be implemented in the care plan. That could mean that everything stays as it was, namely insisting only that the drugs have to be taken.

Furthermore, the review of the care plan can be requested by the carer only before the annual review is due and not the patient/ service user, and the carer can be a family member appointed even against the expressed wish of the patient/service user.

In some cases this can program that the service user is hindered in the recovery. As we know, many severe mental health problems have abuse at the root during childhood. More likely than not this happens not by strangers. 

Being reminded of the abuse even decades later can lead to regression to being like a child. You may have noticed that this was happening during the hearing of victims in Ireland recently when they were facing the perpetrator after many years.

The adoption of the NICE Quality Standards could ensure that the experiences of the service-users/patients could directly influence the treatment. Thus the service user could be directly empowered by having a voice and not only in principle .

With Kind regards

Guenter Etzmuss