Cameras are monitoring patients in NHS mental health bedrooms, but concerns over consent, privacy and staff reliance are now under scrutiny, following patient's deaths. First reported on Unionsafety in May of 2025, now it is finally being questioned at patent's inquests!
It does not take a psychiatrist to understand that human intereaction with a human being suffering mmental health illness, is one of the best and sometimes only way of helping recovery and prevemting suicides.
Yet the dire straughts of the UK's mental health strategy, mainly privatised, charity based; and using remote 'talking therapy' via a mobile phone or via Zoom, is making people feel isolated and of little importance to society.
Now, as reported by Unionsafety.eu earlier this year, tech companies have introudced a video monitoring system into hopsitals, being used by more and more NHS Hopsital Trusts, as a replcement for mental health nurses, to allow the NHS to cut clinical staff, by utelising a monitoring station with one nurse looking over live feeds from solitary patients bedrooms. Even then, video recordings are often used in place of live feeds being watched by staff.
The result? More suicides and deaths amongst Mental Health patients, and not prevention methods ujtilising human contact.
Imagine being left in a single beedroom-like cell alone, knwoing you are being watcdhed via a video camera, with no human contact. Would you feel validated as a person, that your healthcare is of paramoungt umportance?
Lionel Tarassenko, a professor of electrical engineering at Oxford University and founder of the Oxehealth Company, Oxevision, using technology to replace human interaction and diagnosing of patients;has been rolled out in nearly half of mental health trusts across England.
The company running the system, LIOHealth, make a lot out of being a service provider within the NHS in the UK.
In September 2024, the Lampard Enruiry was opened with the job of looking into the state of Mental Health services in Essex was tasked with looking into the deaths of almost 2,000 mental health patients in Essex over more than 20 years.
Its chair, Baroness Kate Lampard, said the true number of lives lost may never be known, and warned of alleged failings on a “deeply shocking” scale.
It’s the first statutory inquiry of its kind looking at the treatment of mental health inpatients, and could have a nationwide impact.
Now, two years on, in a process meant to last another two years, there’s been a development. Last week, we were told the chair, Baroness Lampard, could be looking at making interim recommendations, and the inquiry is going to take a closer look at is a controversial monitoring system called Oxevision.
But the camaign group Stop Oxevision, demancds that the system used within 40% of Mental Health Trusts in England, be stopped; and the technology be removed from mental health wards as soon as possible.
Speaking to Channel 4 News, group member, Hat Porter explained their concerns: “It records 24 hours a day and it’s located in a patient’s bedroom, which is obviously somewhere you’d usually expect to be a private place."
“Our concerns are that the use of the technology has been has been kind of implemented as a substitute for proper in-person support, that it’s kind of over relied on and that there’s a lot of misunderstandings and that the presence of a camera, which has often been used without people’s consent, sometimes without even their knowledge, that that has a really big impact on privacy, dignity and human rights.”
Of course the mental health and hopsital trusts using the system claims otherwise and denies it repalces clinical staff, and dispute their claims about consent and in videos online from NHS trusts, they make it clear that the technology is complementary to trained staff and not a replacement.
The Chair of the inquiry will hear evidence over the next two weeks and then a decision made after that, which could have national impact if she does decide this technology should be investigated or even removed.
Due to cost savings in employing cliical staff, some are very sceptical that will happen.
See also: NHS Mental Health Services Face Major Cuts Across England
Source: Channel4 News / Observer / Unionsafety
