“I am so impressed. Ever thought of singing professionally?” “No. The big bucks are in psychiatry.” —Mel Brooks, High Anxiety
In the past year, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) spent over £2 billion (nearly $3 billion) to send patients to private hospitals. The Priory Group was the main beneficiary of the bounty, pocketing—together with Cygnet, another private provider giant—over 68 percent.
The NHS pays these private, for-profit providers nearly £800 (over $1,000) per day per patient, totaling about £300,000 (nearly $400,000) annually for just one bed. Private providers like Priory are delighted to offer as many beds as needed to help the NHS through its current crisis—an unprecedented demand in the UK for mental health care. For-profit providers like Priory have, accordingly, doubled the available beds for patients during the same period that NHS-provided beds have halved.
It’s a cushy setup.
A healthcare assistant entered, found her hanging, then left her on the floor for 10 minutes before a doctor arrived and began CPR.
And what do the people of the UK get in exchange?
Suicides, for one. Criminal negligence, abuse, trauma and overall corruption for another.
The litany of deaths at Priory facilities is long. And, according to a Times of London investigation, it has been gaining momentum since 2017. In 2021, Priory’s sugar daddy, NHS England, complained that, despite two years of meetings, the provider had failed to change its ways.
Someone once said that if you do the same thing for at least 21 days, it should no longer be a challenge. It will become a habit.
In that case, the Priory Group has long since made death within its portals a habit. In 2022 alone, the UK’s watchdog Care Quality Commission (CQC) reported that Priory faced scrutiny for at least 30 deaths.
The fruits of Priory’s “habit” are plenty; the lives unnecessarily snuffed out due to negligence or abuse are too numerous to catalog.
There were, however, a few times worthy of mention where justice was served—albeit too little and far too late.
Like the death of 14-year-old Amy El-Keria in 2012. She was restrained many times and repeatedly subjected to chemical injections against her will. When staff found her door locked, they had no key. A healthcare assistant entered, found her hanging, then left her on the floor for 10 minutes before a doctor arrived and began CPR. No one accompanied her in the ambulance. No one informed the family until many hours later.
It took four years for an inquest jury to find that gross negligence contributed to Amy’s death and another three before Priory was fined £300,000—or the amount that NHS pays them for one patient bed for a year. It was the first such prosecution and enforced accountability of a private mental health provider.
Priory paid the fine but refused to accept that it had anything to do with Amy’s death.
“Amy loved life, and I know she wanted to live. That her precious life should have ended in a place so devoid of care is something that will forever haunt me,” Amy’s mother, Tania, said. “This whole painful process has been marked by Priory’s long and bitter failure to show any level of remorse or acceptance of responsibility.”
Well, no one expects you to be responsible for a habit. You do it and do it, again and again…
Like the case of the father of three who killed himself in September 2020 after hearing voices and becoming fearful at the thought of being discharged. The Priory doctor waved it off, saying the patient was faking being sick, “malingering” so as to get a nicer room. The coroner said the case was “one of the worst examples of care provided to a vulnerable, mentally ill patient” and that the care he received was “seriously flawed.”
Or the three young women who died within two months of each other at the same Priory facility in 2022.
In the first death, the coroner found that the hospital had so drugged the patient it resulted in a profound and deep sedative effect that suppressed her gag reflex, causing her stomach contents to go into her lungs, effectively killing her. After the second death, the coroner issued a Prevention of Future Deaths Order, urging that action should be taken to prevent future fatalities.
The jury in the coroner’s inquest found that the third death was “contributed to by neglect” by the hospital and that “serious inconsistencies existed across all levels of management in relation to her care plan,” resulting in the “inadequate care of a highly vulnerable patient.”
The following year, a fourth woman died at the same hospital.
It’s tough to break a habit.
“The NHS doesn’t really want to know too much about what is happening in Priory hospitals because they’d then have to do something about it.”
In fact, breaking the habit often takes an intervention from those who know the addict most intimately—in this case, Priory’s former patients, who are part of the advocacy group Mad Youth Organize.
The Mad Youth Organize campaign’s slogan says it all: “WE GET SICK—THEY GET RICH!”
“We’re done with empty mental health ‘awareness’ campaigns,” their website declares. “We want to hold the institutions and executives who profit from our misery to account.” The way to do that, the group explains, is to “decommodify the services that we rely on for life and that give us our human rights,” and that includes shutting down for-profit mental “health” monoliths like Priory Group.
One of Mad Youth Organize’s members, known to us as “Hannah” but known to her handlers as “Room Number Nine,” spoke of the dehumanizing experience of being addressed as a number and not a person, never being allowed outside and being force-fed and drugged without consent or compassion. “Within those walls, you’re just a diagnosis—they don’t see you as a person with a life … and when you’re in there for so long, you start to believe it, too.”
Another organizer, “May,” was told by a psychiatrist that she would never leave the hospital. At age 17, “I was told I would die in a unit, that I had no chance in the outside world.” (Spoiler alert: she made it in the outside world.)
“Rosie,” who once had the goal of a career in mental health, found that world a nightmare. Left on a mattress in a darkened room and suddenly attacked by another patient, she was told that if she didn’t stop screaming, she would be put in solitary. “Patients in psychiatric hospitals are punished, sedated, restrained and forgotten,” she says. “The general public needs to be made aware of what goes on behind the walls that hold some of the most vulnerable people in society. Let’s talk about the systematic abuse of mental health patients. Let’s talk about what actually happens when you ask for help. Let’s demand a radical change.”
Radical change is indeed the only cure for the mockery of care that one of Priory’s own doctors described as an “utter shambles.”
Last year, the Priory Group outdid itself. It was fined £650,000—its biggest criminal penalty yet—for the death of 23-year-old Matthew Caseby, who escaped from the Priory Hospital Woodbourne in Birmingham in 2020 and later died after being hit by a train.
After the sentencing, Matthew’s dad, Richard Caseby, described Priory as a “calculating, cruel and fundamentally dangerous company.”
Mr. Caseby did not confine his bitterness to Priory, but included their prime funder as well, comparing the NHS to “a crack addict” when it comes to private providers. “It outsources the most vulnerable people into Priory hospitals, even when that care is rated as being inadequate,” he said. “The NHS doesn’t really want to know too much about what is happening in Priory hospitals because they’d then have to do something about it.”
Defending the NHS earlier this year, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said, “The independent healthcare sector isn’t going anywhere, and it can help us out of the hole we’re in. We would be mad not to.”
The Center for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI), an independent think tank which monitors the NHS, called Mr. Streeting’s statement “utter nonsense.”
CHPI’s precise and succinct analysis sums up our feelings as well. But we are moved to add that the NHS’ so-called “monetary support” of private for-profit providers like Priory qualifies NHS to be classified as something else entirely: an accessory to the crime.
