Patient was transferred to Cork mental health unit when transfers were not permitted

At the time Unit 3 was prohibited from receiving transferred patients from any centre bar the Carraig Mór intensive psychiatric care centre in Shanakiel, which was then under renovation.

By law, the MHC has the power where it considers a centre to have breached the Mental Health Act, to initiate escalating enforcement actions up to and including the removal of the centre from the register, and the prosecution of its registered proprietor.

In its report, the MHC said it had discontinued the prosecution of Unit 3 after “commitments” were received.

The report does not say from where the transferred patient had come, or what those commitments were.

A HSE spokesperson said Cork Kerry Community Healthcare (CKCH) “are not in a position to provide details about the treatment or placement of individual patients, particularly when patients could be identifiable”.

Regarding the breach at St Stephen’s which led to the MHC prosecution, the spokesperson said CKCH “wishes to confirm that the required administrative remedial action has been undertaken which addresses same”, and “the matter is now closed”.

The MHC meanwhile had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

In its most recent compliance report for the Owenacurra centre — in which the centre received a 90% rating — the MHC noted that a resident had been transferred from Owenacurra to another approved care facility without the MHC being notified of same.

A focused inspection of Owenacurra was carried out on foot of this between August 31 - September 1, 2022.

Last August the Irish Examiner reported that a resident of the Owenacurra mental health facility in Midleton, which had been slated for closure in October 2021, had been transferred to Unit 3 at St Stephen’s Hospital.

That resident had lived at Owenacurra for more than 30 years and had no family representative present at meetings with the HSE regarding the closure.

While they had lived in a single room at Owenacurra, their transfer saw them initially take up a shared occupancy within St Stephen’s.

In March 2022, the inspector of mental health services had voiced his “serious concerns” regarding Unit 3 at St Stephen’s, after a report found the facility had been slow to address critical and high-risk non-compliances.

The hospital had been subject to a string of inspections by the MHC at the time.

Issues identified during those inspections included fire safety problems and a system of governance for Unit 3 which was described as “inexplicable”, while the MHC’s December 2021 inspection report concerning St Stephen’s noted that the “culture” in Unit 3 was “reminiscent of a model of mental health care provided thirty or more years ago”.

It emerged last year that the HSE’s initial plan for the decant of Owenacurra’s then 20 residents at the time of closure had been to move them to dormitory settings in a number of remote locations, including St Stephen’s.