After another preventable death, Jeremy Hunt should admit that he is failing eating disorder patients

The death of 19-year-old Averil was preventable and the Ombudsman said this case was ‘only one example of widespread problems with eating disorders services in the NHS’

Averil’s body was discovered by a cleaner in her university flat after failures in care and communication by NHS bodies led to her death (The Hart family)

Jeremy Hunt has been Health Secretary for five years, and during that time he has been forced to apologise for serious failings in the NHS practically every week. Jeremy Hunt has become the Minister for Preventable Deaths, the Minister for Hand-Wringing and the Minister whose report should read “could do better”.

This week the Ombudsman’s shocking report on the entirely preventable death of 19-year-old Averil Hart is another black mark on Hunt’s record.

The minister seems sincere and personable and claims to be 100 per cent committed to improving healthcare in the UK, but on that count he is an abject failure. As we shiver through the first really cold weather of the season, it’s predicted that the NHS will have spent their £350m winter emergency fund by the end of the month. In some parts of England, hospitals are already full and patients are lying on beds in corridors. The mixed wards that a Labour government promised would be eradicated (after a campaign I launched when my sister died in 2006) still exist.

This week Hunt really hit the jackpot when it comes to hypocrisy. For months now, Harry, Kate and William have promoted a campaign to encourage young people to come forward and discuss their mental health issues. Sadly, if troubled teens decide to seek professional help, their prospects are not good, as NHS mental health provision has deteriorated, in spite of all the royal hand-wringing.

Anorexia and eating disorders affect a huge number of young people, but are notoriously hard to treat. Earlier this year, Hunt unveiled a £150m fund to tackle mental health issues among the young and unveiled new targets – promising that referrals from a GP would receive an appointment with a specialist within four weeks and those classified as an “emergency” within a week. The Telegraph conducted an audit and discovered that only one in six NHS Trusts were managing to meet these targets.

Mr Hunt now says that 95 per cent of children will be seen within his time limits by 2020. That doesn’t help the thousands of anorexic teenagers who are near death in 2017. Indeed, some are starving themselves in order to qualify for inpatient care, but there are only 202 specialised beds in the whole country and there are horror stories of children and teenagers being sent hundreds of miles from their families for treatment.

In spite of all the publicity about mental health, the number of NHS outpatient appointments for anorexia in England dropped from 23,266 in 2013/14 to just 14,847 in 2015/16. There’s simply no cash – Hunt’s much-publicised £150m fund was not ring-fenced and has been used by NHS Trusts to plug other funding gaps.

Yesterday, Hunt was doing more apologising, after a week-long campaign about lack of mental health care for young people on Radio One’s Newsbeat. He said “we have a long way to go… we want to be better.” That will offer very little comfort to the parents of Averil Hart, who starved herself to death in 2012, after a complete failure on the part of four different NHS providers. The Ombudsman said this case was “only one example of widespread problems with eating disorders services in the NHS”. Her father described the care she received as “third world” – and spent £200,000 of his own money investigating Averil’s death, after the NHS wasted two years being evasive and refusing to admit any liability.

Averil had spent 10 months as an inpatient at the Eating Disorders Unit in Cambridge before being discharged in August 2012 so that she could start university. She was supposed to attend weekly appointments as an outpatient in Norwich, but a GP there told her she did not need to come back for a month, in spite of the fact she weighed just over 6 stone. She lost 29 per cent of her body weight over a month, and although her father called the specialist unit to express concern, nothing was done. She was found unconscious and admitted to hospital in Norwich, where she was not seen by an eating disorder specialist. After three days she was transferred to Cambridge where her blood sugar was not properly monitored. After suffering brain damage, Averil died.

A completely preventable death.

The Care Quality Commission has said that 39 per cent of the specialist child and mental health services across the UK “require improvement”. This week, the hospitals involved in the treatment (or perhaps I should write non-treatment) of Averil apologised to her family. As usual they say “lessons have been learned”.

When will Jeremy Hunt accept responsibility for the way the NHS fails to manage itself? Telling young people to discuss their darkest fears is one thing – helping them is another.

If you have been affected by this story, you can contact the following organisations for support:

https://www.mind.org.uk/
https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/
http://www.nhs.uk/livewell/mentalhealth
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/
https://www.samaritans.org/