The families of the victims of Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in Nottingham last year while psychotic, say police and doctors have “blood on their hands” after a damning report laid bare a series of failures by mental health services.
The report by the UK’s Care Quality Commission (CQC) criticised the National Health Service in Nottingham for its handling of Calocane, who had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sectioned four times since 2020 after a series of violent incidents.
The 32-year old’s medical notes showed one psychiatrist had warned he might kill someone, yet Calocane was still discharged to the care of his GP in September 2022 despite evidence he was refusing to take his medication.
Later, in June 2023 during an overnight rampage through Nottingham city centre, he stabbed to death 65-year-old Ian Coates and 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, whose mother Sinead O’Malley is a doctor from Ireland. Calocane also stole Mr Coates’s van and used it to run over three more victims, causing them serious injuries.
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Calocane was sentenced in January to be detained indefinitely in a secure hospital after a court accepted his plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Now an official review of his care has prompted an outcry.
Wes Streeting, Britain’s health secretary, said Tuesday’s CQC report was “shocking” and he had ordered England’s NHS that no more patients should be released after being sectioned if there was evidence they were not taking their medication.
Chris Dzikiti, the CQC’s interim chief inspector of healthcare, said the Nottingham Healthcare NHS Foundation had missed a litany of chances to protect the public from Calocane during its care of him between May 2020 and September 2022. He accused the NHS foundation of “poor decision-making, omissions and errors of judgment”.
“The risk [Calocane] presented to the public was not managed well and opportunities to mitigate that risk were missed,” said Mr Dzikiti.
[ Family of Grace O’Malley-Kumar call for end to knife crime ‘epidemic’Opens in new window ]
He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but his family was not told. The CQC report found some doctors and officials had minimised the risks of Calocane’s refusal to take his medication, which he was prescribed after he started hearing voices. He could have been forced to take long-term injected medication, but this power was never invoked.
In the two years before being discharged to his GP, Calocane was involved in incidents such as breaking into his neighbours’ apartments and assaults of police and his flatmates.
His victims’ families released a joint statement calling for changes to the law to make individual doctors and institutions more culpable for failures of care. Britain’s new Labour government has committed to a judge-led inquiry into the case, but has yet to agree to the full statutory public inquiry demanded by the families.
Commenting on the CQC report, Dr Sanjoy Kumar, Grace’s father, said it showed there was no such thing as drug-resistant schizophrenia.
“The point was that the patient resisted taking his medication and his condition waxed and waned. When someone does that they are fully culpable,” he said in a Sky News interview.
“The risk assessments in his case were really poor by treating consultants and he was sectioned four times. There were four opportunities to change his medication.”
He said they were not told that Calocane had the potential to murder, as was recorded in his medical notes.
“Any psychiatrist who puts out a dangerous person on our streets has to be held responsible for putting that patient out if he has not done a comprehensive risk assessment.”
Grace’s mother, Dr Sinead O’Malley, said statistics demonstrate that if there is a basic care delivery for such patients, homicides do not occur.
They said the various failings in the case must come under the terms of reference of a forthcoming public inquiry.
They were also critical of a “sensationalist” BBC Panorama programme into Calocane which Dr Kumar said did not explore many of the hard questions. Dr O’Malley said they had not been contacted by the programme makers for contribution.
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