A major care provider has admitted a criminal safety failing after a vulnerable man who escaped from a mental health hospital was killed by a train.
The Priory Group, one of the largest private mental health hospital providers in the UK, pleaded guilty to exposing 23-year-old Matthew Caseby to serious risk of harm while he was an inpatient of its Woodbourne Hospital in Birmingham in 2020.
Mr Caseby, a personal trainer, was killed by a train 14 hours after absconding from the hospital, where he had been left alone in the courtyard and jumped over a 2.3-metre-high courtyard fence. Other patients had escaped from the same courtyard before him.
On Friday, Priory Healthcare Ltd admitted breaching the 2008 Health and Social Care Act, by failing to provide safe care and treatment “resulting in Matthew Caseby and other service users being exposed to a significant risk of avoidable harm”.
A second charge brought under the same legislation was withdrawn. The London-based provider now faces an unlimited fine when the sentencing takes place later on Friday.
The charge came after an investigation into the death of Mr Caseby conducted by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and follows a three-year campaign by Mr Caseby’s father Richard, a former managing editor of The Sunday Times.
In a victim impact statement which he read to the court, Mr Caseby said said his son had died needlessly and that, in the aftermath, Priory Healthcare had made the family’s lives “indescribably more painful”.
He added that the firm “had been dragged kicking and screaming” to face hard evidence of its shortcomings and that it had attempted to “hide the facts” about his son’s death.
An inquest in April 2023 found neglect by the hospital, where Mr Caseby was an NHS-funded patient, had contributed to his death.
Following the inquest verdict, Birmingham and Solihull senior coroner Louise Hunt urged health chiefs to consider imposing minimum standards for perimeter fences at acute mental health units.
Opening the case against Priory Healthcare at Birmingham magistrates’ court, CQC barrister James Marsland said other patients had absconded from the ward on previous occasions.
Mr Marsland said: “There was a courtyard (on the ward) which service users were able to access. Part of the perimeter was a fence, which at its shortest was 2.3 metres tall.
“The prosecution say that they failed to provide safe care and treatment in that they failed to properly assess the risk.
“The prosecution do not suggest that the defendant is to be sentenced on the basis that it has caused the death of Matthew.”
Mitigating for Priory Healthcare, whose chief executive Rebekah Cresswell attended the court hearing, Mr Greaney said: “The company’s conduct in relation to this prosecution has been wholly co-operative and responsible.
“It should be publicly understood that the company has not admitted any charge alleging it caused Mr Caseby’s death.”
The defence lawyer added that the company had pleaded guilty on the basis that it had exposed service users to a risk of avoidable harm by not carrying out a full review of three previous abscondments from the ward, not all of which took place over the same fence.
The first two of three incidents in 2018, 2019 and 2020 saw patients suffer no injury. But the third incident on July 17 2020 saw a male patient, who visited a supermarket, suffering a cut to the leg.
The Priory Group has received fines previously following prosecutions by the CQC. The first in 2019 for £300,000 came after the death of 14-year-old Amy El-Keria who was at its Ticehurst Hospital. The second in November 2020 came after the death of 21-year-old Fancesca Whyatt, who took her life at Roehampton Priory Hospital.
In September 2023 a young woman called Amina Ismail died at the Priory Cheadle Royal hospital in Manchester, following three deaths the year before.
Mr Caseby, who lived in London, was originally detained under the Mental Health Act following reports of a man running on to railway tracks near Oxford five days before his death.