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Abuses of patient rights in psychiatric hospitals take place "all the time across the country in one way or another," the Mental Health Act Commission has claimed.

Chris Heginbotham, chief executive of the MHAC, said: "Some of the things we find are really quite shocking."

Commissioners employed by the MHAC to monitor services regularly uncover practices at hospitals that are "totally inexcusable," Heginbotham told delegates at Mind's annual conference last week.

Among the cases the commission had come across was a patient who had been detained under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983 a dozen times. But under the act, section 2, which allows a person to be detained for up to 28 days, cannot be renewed. The misuse of this section meant that the patient had been detained unlawfully for eight months.

Another case involved a person with learning difficulties who was detained informally and was left in a room for two days before he was assessed.

Heginbotham said cases like these were "just the tip of the ice-berg".

"Often these things are put right quite quickly [when they are highlighted] but that's not the point. They show a lack of basic procedures apart from anything else. It is appalling that we have had the Mental Health Act for 22 years and some providers are not following the basic procedures," he added.

He went on to say that "on paper" service users' rights had improved over the past 20 years, with the introduction of legislation such as the Human Rights Act 1998, but in practice they were still "neither sufficient nor robust".

Heginbotham was very concerned at the number of deaths in which physical restraint was a factor: "Surely the fundamental right is the right to life. It is a sad fact that one person has died every year for the past 15 years as a result of physical restraint."


Guidelines published by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence last month on physical restraint provoked outrage because they failed to introduce a three-minute time limit for use, leaving some experts warning of more such deaths in future.

A key recommendation of the inquiry report into the death of David Bennett, who died in 1998 after being restrained face down for 25 minutes, was a three-minute limit.

• The Mental Health Act Commission will merge with the Healthcare Commission in 2007.