“It has been over six years since the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and the mental health trust promised to stop sending ill people out of area for treatment. In those six years, we’ve had three governments and four health secretaries. NSFT has been rated as ‘inadequate’ three times.

And after all that, there are still far too few local mental health beds and preventative services are still woefully underfunded. The knock-on of that is patients routinely discharged before they’ve fully recovered. Local health managers continually blame each other while going round and round a revolving door of reward-for-failure as the government evades its responsibility by pointing at ‘local failures’.

As I’ve said before, what we’re looking at is a total systemic failure. What will it take for various protagonists in this seemingly neverending tragic farce to face up to that simple and obvious fact? Unless they do, there will continue to be hundreds of other terrified and ill people sent hundreds of miles away from their families.”