Drug rehab centre closes after inspection found it couldn’t safely care for patients

A drug rehab centre in South London has closed after inspectors found it couldn’t look after people it cared for.

Brook Drive in Southwark admitted patients with serious physical and mental health problems even though it wasn’t equipped to treat them, a CQC report published on February 10 found.

Inspectors banned the centre from admitting more patients until it could employ an on-site psychiatrist following the inspection in July 2021.

But despite advertising the job for six months, managers said they couldn’t afford the salaries demanded by applicants. The centre closed in January.

Brook Drive in Elephant & Castle was given the worst possible rating of inadequate after inspectors visited it in July 2021.

They found 13 people had been sent to hospital by ambulance from the centre since the beginning of 2021.

Two times staff had delayed calling an ambulance despite the situation being an emergency.

Managers and staff didn’t understand that seizures should be treated as urgent.

Inspectors banned Brook Drive from admitting more patients until it had qualified staff and issued it with two warning notices for failing to comply with legal safeguarding and governance requirements.

The CQC report published on February 10 reads: “The service admitted clients with serious and significant physical and mental health problems, which the service could not safely provide care and treatment for.

“Since the beginning of 2021, 13 clients had been transferred by emergency ambulance from the service to hospital. On two occasions there had been a delay in transferring clients by ambulance.

It continues: “The procedure in the service, in summary, was to treat and monitor a client if they had one seizure and to transfer them to hospital after two seizures or a prolonged seizure.”

“The service was not equipped to provide full care to these clients, such as blood testing.

“Managers and staff did not recognise that a client having a seizure should be treated as an emergency requiring hospital care.”

A spokesperson for Equinox Care, which ran Brook Drive, said: “Sadly, after providing a much-needed community-based residential detox service since 1991, we took the difficult decision to close Brook Drive’s doors for good in January 2022.

“We were unable to meet the clinical expectations recently set by the CQC following their inspection of us back in July; one was to employ a dedicated addiction psychiatrist based at the property.

“We tried to recruit over the past six months, and to ensure we were compliant with the CQC; we had to close while we searched.

“No matter how hard we tried to recruit such a person, we could not afford to do so, as the salaries required could not be met. We had to make the hard decision to close our doors and repurpose the building.

“We hope to partner with an NHS Trust or another provider and find a new property to deliver this much-needed service once again.

“When we were open, we supported close to 600 residents in London each year pre-Covid-19, helping them with their addictions.”

Brook Drive provided on-site rehab for up to 27 adults with drug and alcohol addiction issues.