http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... osses.htmlJimmy Savile 'was given key position at Broadmoor and even personally selected hospital's bosses'
27 October 2013
-Sex offender had huge influence on the way hospital was run
-He had keys and a living space and was given key executive role
-Former DJ is accused of abusing a number of patients
Disgraced entertainer Jimmy Savile was given a key position running Broadmoor and personally selected managers, it was claimed last night.
A former manager claimed that politicians and civil servants thought he was the ‘bee’s knees’ and appointed him to a task force to run the hospital in 1988.
The Top Of The Pops presenter has since been unmasked as one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders, but was ‘given the keys’ to Broadmoor.
Savile had had a long association with the hospital, having been a volunteer worker there in the 1970s and 1980s with the unofficial title ‘honorary entertainments officer’.
He had his own set of keys and living quarters on site and is accused of sexually abusing a number of patients.
It is now claimed that he had a far bigger role than previously thought and was able to choose managers to run the hospital.
He is also said to have been put in charge of a committee which examined the welfare of patients, even though the new management were given no say in his appointment.
A manager who had close links to Broadmoor told a newspaper: ‘Savile was a national entertainer and was in charge of this psychiatric unit. I thought it was extraordinary, but the civil servants and the politicians apparently thought he was the bee’s knees.’
A female civil servant at the health department had complained to her boss that Savile had kissed her on the mouth before a meeting with Edwina Currie yet nothing was done.
He was appointed by Mrs Currie, then a junior health minister, despite the fact he had no expertise in mental health.
The Broadmoor taskforce, which replaced the previous suspended management, was set up in August 1988.
The Earl of Dundee told the House of Lords that Savile was ‘devoting his considerable talents to ensuring that the hospital functions smoothly’.
Alan Franey, a taskforce member and later Broadmoor’s general manager, said: ‘Savile was appointed to the task force by Edwina Currie, but it would have been on the recommendation of civil servants. It was a bit odd.’
Cliff Graham, under-secretary at the Department of Health and an advocate for NHS change, recommended that Savile sit on the taskforce.
Former Broadmoor staff recall being called to meetings with the DJ.
Mr Franey said: ‘I had an unusual meeting in the Athenaeum Club in London [Jimmy Savile and Cliff Graham were present]... and I was persuaded that a move to Broadmoor would be a good career step.’
The late David Edmond, the first chairman of the Special Hospitals Service Authority (SHSA), recalled: ‘I [was] asked to a strange meeting at Stoke Mandeville Hospital with Cliff Graham, Jimmy Savile, a retired Department of Health senior civil servant and other department officials...’
One manager at the hospital reflected on Savile’s influence: ‘We were told that he was a valuable asset, that he was well thought of in high circles in the Department of Health and it was important we got on good terms and that we cultivated what he had to offer.
‘Cliff Graham quite explicitly told me those things and said much the same to David Edmond.’
Mr Franey added that Mr Graham was in favour of Savile. He said: ‘Savile’s connections were significant. Everyone knew of the close friendship between Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, and Savile, whom she regularly invited to Chequers.’
There is no suggestion that Mr Franey or any of the civil servants and politicians had any knowledge of Savile’s abuse.
Staff at the hospital said they reported issues to management, but nothing was done.
Richard Harrison, a psychiatric nurse at Broadmoor for 30 years, said of Savile’s appointment: ‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum.’
He added: ‘I considered him, as many of my colleagues did, as a man with a severe personality disorder and a liking for children.’
Bob Allen, a former nurse, said he saw Savile take a girl who looked 14 or 15 years old into his house.
When he reported it, his supervisor said: ‘No one appears to be interested.’
Last night, Broadmoor did not respond to requests for a comment.
Cliff Graham, huh?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peopl ... 84051.htmlClifford Graham, civil servant: born Liverpool 3 April 1937; Clerical Officer, Admiralty 1954-59; Executive Officer, Customs and Excise 1959-65; Higher Executive Officer, Ministry of Health 1965-68; Principal, DHSS (later Department of Health) 1969- 74, Assistant Secretary 1975-82, Under-Secretary 1983-94; called to the Bar, Gray's Inn 1969; Director, Institute of Health, King's College London 1990-94; twice married (two sons, one daughter); died Milton Clevedon, Somerset 2 July 1994.
CLIFFORD GRAHAM was one of the people who made things happen in the National Health Service and in the wider issues of a healthy community. His work with Sir Roy Griffiths led to the introduction of general management in the NHS; he collaborated with the barrister Louis Blom- Cooper in tackling problems in mental health and illness and he was chairman of Newpin, an organisation concerned with disadvantage and abuse in the family. Graham epitomised imaginative management and would not be distracted from pursuing action on policies he thought to be right; indeed he took pleasure in exploring unconventional pathways to a proper end. That he was a civil servant, and grateful to the service for the chance it gave him, makes this all the more remarkable.
[...]
During his time as Under-Secretary in the Mental Health Division of the department he worked closely with Blom-Cooper at the Mental Health Act Commission; he established the Special Health Authority for secure hospitals and met Jimmy Savile in their work for Broadmoor Hospital. A chance encounter led to Graham's becoming a trustee and then chairman of Newpin, which began in south London and has spread across Britain.
I spotted this on a Newpin website (there are several different sites)
See also:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2126545/The future of Britain's high security hospitals
The culture and values won't change until the Prison Officers' Association is ousted
1997 May 3
Until a decade or so ago, the vast majority of mentally disordered offenders who posed a threat to public safety in Britain were consigned to one of the country's three “special hospitals”, Broadmoor, Rampton, and Ashworth (previously Moss Side and Park Lane). This is no longer the case. Most patients on whom a crown court judge has imposed a restriction order (under section 37/41 of the Mental Health Act 1983) are now cared for in regional secure units, general NHS psychiatric inpatient acute units, and independent sector hospitals. These institutions operate far more liberal regimes but with no less safety and without the problems that have dogged the special hospitals. Now that their role is much diminished, do these troubled hospitals have any role in the future of forensic mental health care? And if they do, how can they become clinically excellent institutions?
The special hospitals were run directly by the Home Office and staffed like prisons until 1948. They were then transferred to the Ministry of Health but did not join the new NHS, being managed directly by civil servants. After increasing concern in the late 1980s about standards of care and security, the Special Hospitals Service Authority was established in 1989 to oversee the service at arm's length from the Department of Health. The undersecretary responsible for the service at that time, Cliff Graham, made no secret of his disquiet about the proposed continuation of a centralised management structure, but he felt it was a reasonable interim solution while the hospitals prepared themselves for greater self governance. One of the authority's main problems was to establish management control over a large group of staff that Mr Graham and others perceived to have a damaging influence on standards of care through their rigid, authoritarian, and denigrating attitudes to patients. A widely leaked internal report (the Olliff report, Department of Health, 1988, unpublished) suggested that, unless these staff members could be controlled, the only solution to the persistent problem of poor quality care was rapid closure of all three hospitals.
The authority was thus to be a transitional body with a maximum life of five years to effect the modernisation of the service and explore the possibility of closing the institutions. In the event, the authority survived seven years, and the hospitals did not close. They finally joined the NHS as three separate health authorities only in April last year. However, a central commissioning role was retained in the form of the High Security Commissioning Board within the Department of Health.
The hospitals' origins within the criminal justice system and their subsequent exclusion from the main stream of mental health services explain the curious anomaly that their dominant staff union is the Prison Officers' Association. This union, or perhaps more accurately its membership within the hospitals, has played a fundamentally destructive role in the struggle to turn the hospitals into therapeutic institutions. The service has been dogged for 50 years by recurrent scandals pointing to an environment and culture which reflects on the uncaring and demeaning attitude to patients. The 1992 Ashworth Hospital inquiry report reflected at length on a regime that seemed to have learnt little from the 1980 Boynton inquiry on conditions at Rampton. Biennial reports of the Mental Health Act Commission since 1984 have repeatedly commented on the impoverished regime, overly restrictive and often petty security regulations, the emphasis on mechanical security rather than on the safer strategy of getting to know patients well, and the lack of therapeutic optimism of staff.
The blame for such conditions has been attributed repeatedly to a core group of members of the Prison Officers' Association which has exercised enormous power. This group has filled the vacuum created as hospital management teams had their authority increasingly undermined and invalidated by senior civil servants and ministers, both in the Home Office and Department of Health, who, in the words of one civil servant, wanted to keep the lid on things. Local managers have repeatedly been prevented from taking the tough measures necessary to root out union ringleaders for fear of provoking industrial action that could then spread to prisons. Latterly, a ministerial culture of obeisance to tabloid press public opinion has added a further unhelpful dimension.
What those involved find particularly depressing is that heroic attempts have in fact been made in recent years to improve the hospitals; first rate chief executives were appointed, some joint academic appointments have been made, some new ward managers were brought in from outside. Most importantly, the sole negotiating rights on terms and conditions of service held by the Prison Officers' Association were ended, and staff who wished to ally themselves with the quite different culture and values of the Royal College of Nursing and Unison were at last able to sit in at the staff management negotiating forum. Furthermore, patients' councils have been established in the past five years, and the complaints machinery has improved. There has also been steady, hard won progress towards a 24 hour nursing regime to replace the old 10 hour, night time lock up in single rooms and dangerously claustrophobic dormitories. This has required staff to accept unwelcome major changes to their shift patterns and working practices.
An increasing majority of nursing staff now belong to the Royal College of Nursing or Unison. In Broadmoor in 1988, 800 of the 1200 staff were members of the Prison Officers' Association, compared with 500 today. There remain, however, about 1000 members in the three hospitals, and many staff have dual membership. Working in the special hospitals is highly stressful and occasionally dangerous. The work requires exceptional personal skills and qualities. But the same is true of regional secure units, and indeed the most disturbed and difficult acutely ill offenders are cared for without support from the Prison Officers' Association.
Since the three new authorities were established last year, the new boards have increased their efforts to persuade the Prison Officers' Association to accept a liberalised and safer regime, but the union's response has been, in the words of a senior staff member at Broadmoor, to go back to their old ways. In all three hospitals a hard core of staff—at Broadmoor estimated to be 150 or so—are believed to be behind a new wave of hate mail, intimidation of new staff, victimisation of nonmembers, and threats to senior managers (a toy grenade was found under a senior executive's car last month). Frank Jordan, the chairman of the union's Broadmoor branch, resigned in late March, it is widely thought because of his lack of sympathy with the old guard and a feeling that he could not oust the trouble makers. There are many decent men and women in the union, but their voices are swamped by the vociferous minority.
The government's 1994 review of high security services concluded that the special hospitals no longer meet future requirements, and a wide range of smaller units providing different styles of care and rehabilitation would be needed. Plans for new services for those long term patients who need lesser degrees of security are now well advanced, and the transfer of these patients will leave the hospitals with the most difficult groups to manage. The three new hospital boards have the management talent and imagination to provide a diverse range of improved services for these difficult patients. But they must have the unequivocal support of the NHS Executive and ministers to remove NHS patients from the care of an inappropriate union. Put bluntly, if such a union has a role in a civilised society, it is surely not working in hospitals caring for seriously mentally ill people. The choice is a stark one: either the hospitals must change or they must close completely. Many observers believe that the culture and values will never change until the Prison Officers' Association is ousted. Derecognition of the union's right to negotiate on its members' behalf would be a first step to removing it from the institutions, a move which all the authorities would welcome.
Last year, the three special hospitals' chief executives asked Ken Jarrold, the NHS Executive director responsible for policy on human resources, whether the executive would support derecognition of the union. Mr Jarrold sympathised but felt that such a move would only be supported by ministers after the election.
The election has come and gone. Let us hope that the new secretary of state for health will have the courage to support such a decision.
Elaine Murphy, Chairman
City and Hackney Community Health Services Trust
Ashworth Hospital Inquiry (1992) investigated the circumstances surrounding four specimen untoward incidents: a patient's sudden death, an alleged sexual assault by staff on a patient, and serious physical assaults. The events spanned several years. The Panel found:
• a culture of denigration of patients
• frequent physical and mental bullying of patients by
staff
• overt racist attitudes and staff membership of right
wing, racist political groups
• victimisation and bullying of RCN members
• poor quality nursing care
• frequent use of seclusion as a punishment
• a rigid, over restrictive regime
• circulation of hate mail and offensive literature to
patients and victimised staff
• lack of therapeutic optimism, poor clinical team work
She actually 
