Government Opens Its Eyes - But People With Severe Mental Illness Are Still Dying Unnecessarily, UK

Main Category: Mental Health
Article Date: 11 Jun 2008 - 0:00 PST

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New research by Rethink suggests that less than half of people with severe mental illness are getting the healthchecks GPs are meant to provide. Rethink welcomed the new government recognition of the problem in its report released Health inequalities: progress and next steps, but warned that urgent action is needed to stop thousands of people with severe mental illness dying unnecessarily.

Rethink chief executive Paul Jenkins said: "People with a severe mental illness die, on average, 10 years younger than other people. Not because of the mental illness, but because people are denied access to the cancer, heart disease and diabetes services the rest of the population now take for granted.

"People with severe mental illness are meant to receive physical healthchecks at GP surgeries, but new research by Rethink suggests that less than half of people are actually getting them.

"The government has opened its eyes to this problem, which is a step forward, but smoking rates and obesity levels remain unacceptably high. Too little imagination and too little cash is being invested in bringing them down. The Government has still not implemented recommendations from the ground-breaking Disability Rights Commission report two years ago, which called for the scandal of poor physical health amongst people with severe mental illness to be tackled without delay."

Rethink called for:

- Implementation of all recommendations from the Disability Rights Commission 'Unequal Treatment' report of 2006

- GPs to be incentivised to promote physical healthchecks

- Renewed investment in the Well-Being Nurses programme which is designed to enable people with severe mental illness to tackle physical health issues

- Partnership programmes with the voluntary sector to roll-out mental health specific versions of existing physical health programmes, such as smoking cessation clinics

- PCTs to provide Mental health inpatient wards to provide specialist physical healthcare teams

Notes

1. Rethink surveyed 942 people with severe mental illness from January to April 2008. 52% said that the GP had not offered them an annual health check in the last 2 years.

2. The Disability Rights Commission report, Unequal Treatment, was published in September 2006. It found that:

- Women with schizophrenia are 42% more likely to get breast cancer .
- People with schizophrenia are almost twice as likely as other citizens to have bowel cancer - the second most common cause of cancer death in Britain.
- People with schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder or depression have far higher rates of obesity, smoking, heart disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and stroke than other people.
- Despite this evidence, GP surgeries and health trusts are breaking the law by not implementing the Disability Discrimination Act.

http://www.rethink.org

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