Human Rights in NHS Mental Health Settings

Do you agree with the following statements?

• “In an ideal world, Human Rights would be everybody’s business”.
• “There is a lot of legislation, and it’s very complex, and so it is unreasonable to expect every member of staff to have an in-depth detailed understanding of all the legislation”

There’s a tension created here – organisations are telling staff that those staff members are responsible for protecting the human rights of patients, but simultaneously telling staff that they don’t need to know what those human rights are, nor where they’re written in law, nor how to protect those rights. This puts staff into weird, difficult, situations.

When something is everybody’s business it ends up being nobody’s business.

Sometimes you’ll hear an organisation say “The mental health act is written so that it’s compatible with human rights laws, and if you’re following the MHA you’ll also be complying with human rights laws.”

This is problematic in a couple of different ways. Law is written in acts and statutes and statutory instruments, but it’s also in case law. We do have human rights based case laws challenges to the mental health act, and I believe this shows that following the mental health act isn’t enough – your organisation also needs to understand human rights law. Another problem is that law is written, and then it’s interpreted by people doing the job. The written law may well be compatible with human rights conventions, but the law as it’s used can diverge somewhat. This is why things like the MHA Code of Practice exist – it’s so difficult to understand the Mental Health Act that we needed to create a simplified guide. The Wessley Review was needed because of this divergence. And