Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
BMA report on health and human rights in immigration detention
The British Medical Association (BMA) has published a new report on health and human rights in immigration detention in the UK.
Locked up, locked out outlines how aspects of current detention policies and practices are detrimental to the health of those detained and the challenges doctors face in providing healthcare in the immigration detention setting. It makes a number of recommendations aimed at addressing policy and practice which impact on health and well-being, including calling for an end to the routine use of detention as a means of monitoring those facing removal from the UK and for the introduction of a time limit on the length of time individuals can be detained. It also provides guidance for doctors working in these settings on some of the common ethical and professional dilemmas they may face.
The report can be accessed and downloaded at www.bma.org.uk/immigrationdetention.
The government is to review mental health legislation in England and Wales
The Government has announced its intention to review mental health legislation (the 1983 Mental Health Act, as amended) for England and, in relation to non-devolved issues, for Wales.1
The Government states that it is ‘committed to delivering parity of esteem between mental and physical health’, although it does not clarify the meaning of ‘parity of esteem’. Similarly, the Government states that it wants to ensure that people with mental health problems ‘are treated with dignity, and that their liberty and autonomy is respected as far as possible’. Again, the Government has not indicated the meaning of ‘as far as possible’.
Although not directly mentioned in the review’s terms of reference, it must be set against the background of changing legal and ethical expectations in relation to the rights of those with mental or cognitive disorders and disabilities. The UK is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with …
Footnotes
Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Ethics briefings
- Is supervised community treatment ethically justifiable?
- Community treatment orders and associations with readmission rates and duration of psychiatric hospital admission: a controlled electronic case register study
- Accessing acute medical care to protect health: the utility of community treatment orders
- Ethics briefings
- Acceptability of compulsory powers in the community: the ethical considerations of mental health service users on Supervised Discharge and Guardianship
- Evaluating the effects of community treatment orders (CTOs) in England using the Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS): protocol for a national, population-based study
- Ethics briefings
- Identity, law, policy and Communicating Mental Health
- Reforming mental health law in England and Wales