A private healthcare provider has agreed to pay damages to a patient with learning disabilities after staff broke his arm, The Independent can reveal. Cygnet Health Care, one of the largest providers of mental health inpatient care in the UK, has settled a claim with the former patient of a hospital it now owns. Jamie Newcombe, a 29-year-old young autistic man with learning disabilities, made a claim against the healthcare giant after he alleged he suffered “significant physical and psychological harm” at an assessment and treatment unit called Bostall House in London.
According to the claim, when he was a patient at Bostell House in 2014, then owned by another private company The Danshell Group, he was “violently restrained by staff and pushed out into the hospital garden.” As a result of this restraint, he says he sustained a fracture in his right arm. Staff allegedly left his injuries untreated for 24 hours.
Mr Newcombe was a patient at Bostall House when he was 19 years old, from 2014 to 2015. The unit was owned by the Danshell Group which also owned the notorious Whorlton Hall where a BBC Panorama episode exposed staff abusing patients. Cygnet Health Care, owned by US private equity-backed group Universal Health Services, took over the Danshell Group’s hospitals in 2018.
Other Danshell Group hospitals taken over by Cygnet Health Care, such as Yew Trees Hospital, have also faced serious allegations of abuse. Cygnet Health said it had identified abuse at Yew Tree.