NHS manager says trust wanted 4,000 reports 'gone'

NHS manager says trust wanted 4,000 reports 'gone'Image source, Lampard InquiryImage caption, Brian O'Donnell told the Lampard Inquiry he had worked in child and adolescent mental health services in Essex for more than 20 yearsByNikki FoxEast of England health correspondentPublishedJust nowA senior clinical manager at the trust that runs mental health services in Essex says he was told 4,000 unresolved patient safety reports needed to be "gone", while a public inquiry was under way.Giving evidence to the Lampard Inquiry, Brian O'Donnell, a clinical lead at the St Aubyn Centre in Colchester, said he believed the trust was "panicking" and also accused it of a "cover up" to stop him from speaking out. The inquiry was set up following the deaths of more than 2,000 mental health patients over a 24-year period.Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) told the BBC: "All reports are taken seriously, recorded and investigated."Image source, EPUTImage caption, The St Aubyn Centre, which opened in 2012, is a child and adolescent mental health unitO'Donnell told the inquiry that, at the end of 2024, he was asked to review thousands of incident reports raised by staff, some dating back to 2021.He said he was instructed by a senior member of staff, who said: 'We need to get these gone'."He said they included incidents involving self-harm, assaults on staff and racial abuse."The first thing that popped into my head was there's an inquiry going on and they're panicking about these because no-one's looked at them - that was my first thought and that's what I still think."Talking about the way the trust acted at the time, he said: "There wasn't, 'Can there be a thorough investigation of these and can you feed back?' It was, 'We need these gone, we need these processed and we need them gone.'"O'Donnell said he initially c...