Serial escapes in psychiatry in Toulouse: “No one is infallible”, says the president of the Syndicate of psychiatrists
In ten days, four individuals managed to thwart the surveillance of a psychiatric unit in Toulouse at the Gérard-Marchant hospital and at the CHU Purpan. Maurice Bensoussan, psychiatrist in Toulouse and president of the Syndicate of French psychiatrists, reacts.
Do these different “runaways” represent a danger for populations when we know the profile of these individuals?
The repetition of these events is very worrying, especially since these patients have not been allowed to leave their establishment. It means they have transgressed something. If a psychiatric patient leaves his establishment when he is not authorized to do so because there is a risk for him or for the population, it is a serious adverse event in psychiatry. Each serious adverse event is the subject of an in-depth analysis to understand the reasons for these incidences, to find out if there has been professional misconduct and to identify areas for improvement. Today the challenge is to achieve zero risk, but for the moment we are not getting there yet. Let’s not forget that in an advanced society, we owe care to the mentally or physically ill regardless of skin color or human quality.
These events have multiplied in Toulouse: are the psychiatric units of the department in bad shape?
The ill escaped fromdifferent hospitals in Toulouse. But it is true that there are coincidences which presuppose the question. There is also a very tense health context, the teams are under a lot of pressure. Do not minimize the difficulty of the job. There are failures, no one is infallible. It makes sense to be announced today. But Iwould like us to pay tribute to the professionals who deal with such difficult patients whom society rejects. It is necessary to realize the difficulty of caring for people whose actions have created so much revulsion, so much abomination and horror. It’s hard work and we don’t understand it enough.
What should be done to prevent such situations from happening again?
We are still hoping for state aid. Resources must be distributed according to need. We must also understand why there was this repetition in Toulouse so that it does not happen again. This is also not very common, but there corrective measures must be taken. The first analyzes of the specific clinical situations have already been done, in my opinion, since we are a few days after these incidents. The fault must now be punished: on a need to make legal progress to improve risk management.