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Mental Patient Wins £400,000 in Negligence Compensation for Failed Suicide
Posted on Jul 01, 2009
A mental patient who survived after throwing himself in front of a tube train has been awarded £400,000 in compensation after alleging that a psychiatric unit had failed to protect him from himself.
48 year old Noel Davison went "absent without leave" from the psychiatric unit at Whittington Hospital, North London, nine days before his suicide attempt, which left him alive but with pelvic fractures and serious head injuries.
In his claim, Mr Davison and his lawyers alleged that Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust had failed to protect him from himself by failing to take 'sufficient steps' to ensure that he stayed at the unit and that they had failed to assess his mental state properly.
Mr Davison had walked out of the unit without permission previously, on 2nd January 2004, but had returned voluntarily six days later before going "absent without leave" on 13th January.
During the case at the High Court, the court heard of Mr Davison's "long-standing history of depression and anxiety" and how he had been admitted to the unit initially in November 2003 as a voluntary patient after attempting suicide.
The Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust denied liability for Mr Davison's suicide attempt and injuries but a compromise was reached when the NHS Litigation Authority agreed to pay Mr Davison a compensation amount of £400,000.
A spokeswoman for the mental health charity SANE, Marjorie Wallace, said: "We hope this will make psychiatric units much more careful in protecting the lives of their patients. It is not unusual for this to happen. People walk out of wards, sometimes due to a under staffing, sometimes due to a culture of not wanting to interfere with a person's liberty, and quite often it is down to not enough care in preventing people from leaving when they are disturbed or depressed and failing to carefully assess the risks they pose to themselves. Most people who are in a psychiatric unit have to be pretty seriously ill and you cannot expect them, particularly if they are severely depressed, psychotic or out of touch with reality to make rational judgements."