Elysium Healthcare was founded in 2016 and is owned by BC Capital. They bought up several mental health hospitals, mainly from the Priory Group and Partnership in Care. This page records how many of those hospitals have gone downhill rapidly after Elysium took over. Are these private equity companies milking the system, having the NHS pay for expensive care, and underinvesting in care in order to make excessive profits for their offshore owners? You decide.
Rhodes Wood Hospital in Hatfield – Good when acquired. Inadequate from the first inspection under Elysium Healthcare (2019). Our experience is of low staff morale, high staff turnover, high proportion of untrained agency staff, many safeguarding risks. Elysium say, “We have a new senior leadership team at the hospital who are tasked with ensuring that training, reporting and clinical protocols are all of the very highest standard.” Except that it’s been two years since that new management, multiple other inspections by CQC, and the situation seems to be even worse (hence this website)!
Woodhouse Hospital, in Cheadle was a lovely hospital but after acquisition by Elysium, CQC put it in special measures in September 2019. 90% of ward posts were filled by unqualified support workers and there were insufficient qualified nurses according to the CQC. 40% of posts were vacant!
Potters Bar Clinic in Hertfordshire – similar story. It was a great hospital till Elysium took it over and ruined it. In 2019 the CQC said, “What we found at Potters Bar Clinic did not represent the care people should expect to receive”. They found a “litany of failings at the hospital”. The CQC has serious concerns about this hospital. More here. There’s plenty of bad news around about Potters Bar Clinic.
Alfreton’s Field House in Derbyshire was ordered by CQC to make improvements in 2019 but in just got worse. In 2020 a patient was found dead. In August 2020, the CQC judged them inadequate. “There were insufficient nursing staff and they did not have the skills and experience to keep patients safe from avoidable harm”. That’s not the only hospital in which a patient died unnecessarily.
Arbury Court in Warrington was the location where a 22 year old patient took her own life and, according to the Warrington Safeguarding Adults Board, “staff facilitated Ms Davis’ means of self-harm on the day of her death.” The CQC have raised concerns about staff shortages at this unit.
St Mary’s Hospital in Orford was acquired by Elysium in August 2018. By March 2019 CQC served them a warning notice. Since 2019 they’ve been under a CQC “requires improvement”.
Aberbeeg Hospital / Pendarren Court in Wales had inadequate staff and useless (actually absent!) management and the regulator suspended their licence. Various residents of the locality have numerous complaints about this facility and have taken their issues up with the police and even the local planning enforcement officers.
Ty Grosvenor in Wrexham, Wales was, similarly, criticised. The inspectors placed a restriction on them accepting new patients after serious concerns over the way it’s being run (in May 2020. In a follow up inspection in Oct 2020 they still had “serious concerns”).
The Copse, in Weston-super-mare, was given a “Requires Improvement” by CQC in 2019, not long after getting taken over by Elysium. The CQC found failings in management and safety.
Farndon: In December 2018 Elysium Healthcare (Farndon), after pleading guilty at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court, was fined £500,000 and ordered to pay costs of £67,500. The Daily Mail says Elysium get over £400K per patient per year and it could be as much as £730K; they pay support workers £16K; last year the Farndon unit got NHS revenues of £7m and made a profit of £1.6m. (Elysium paid its three directors £726,000 last year.)
Brierley Court in Manchester was a CQC Good when it was owned by Partnerships in Care (2016 inspection). Then Elysium took it over and CQC decided to downgrade it to a Requires Improvement in 2018 – “requires improvement” on every metric, from management to safety! That’s quite an achievement in such a short time.
Chadwick Lodge lost an appeal at an Employment Tribunal when an employee complained that their supervisor was stealing food from patients. Elysium wanted to punish this employee for whistle blowing. Elysium lost. (But stealing food from mental health patients?!). In 2019 a young patient at this hospital tragically died. Her parents have demanded an enquiry.
More examples to come later.
Be mindful that in every failing Elysium hospital there are real people – desperately ill children, adults with high special needs and other mental health patients who are not getting the care that we as a society should be providing them. We have abandoned them to an offshore private equity firm that gets paid large sums of money by the NHS to look after these patients but who are doing a miserable job.
There are also some really dedicated employees, people who work hard, put up with a lot of nonsense, and aren’t getting paid what they’re worth.
Elysium are very good at the management speak – about “rigorous’ action plans” being put in place, about “the safety and well-being of patients (being) their highest priority”, about implementing “a change of senior leadership” blah, blah. Or they’ll say, “This inspection took place part-way through a long-running quality improvement plan and many of the changes required have already been embedded.” They’ll also talk about how they are recruiting new staff, improving systems etc. But are they always short of staff because they aren’t paying well enough?
From our experience in Rhodes Wood, that’s all talk. Nothing really changes. That is why these, and other Elysium hospitals, continue to leave CQC and others deeply unimpressed.
What does the CQC say?
In a Freedom of Information Act disclosure, the CQC states this about Elysium Healthcare’s first two years:
In 2016/17, CQC issued 2 Requirement Notices against services provided by
Elysium Healthcare Limited.
In 2017/18, CQC issued 15 Requirement Notices against services provided by
Elysium Healthcare Limited. CQC also issued 6 Warning Notices and put a
service into special measures. A Fixed Penalty Notice was also issued against a
service.
That’s quite a big jump in just one year!
In the first year after acquisitions it would appear that those hospitals were benefiting from the good foundation built by the previous owners. Elysium seem to have done a very quick job of running those hospitals down.
We do not have figures for 2019 and 2020 yet but we shall update this page when CQC provide the information requested.
What are Elysium Healthcare about?
According to iNews, they are fat cat exploiters of patients with mental health problems. They make obscene profit at the expense of children and adults suffering from mental health issues. According to the article, they take huge sums from the NHS, deliver an inadequate standard of care and made hundreds of millions of pounds of profit last year for their Luxembourg registered firm.
And now they’ve hired JP Morgan to sell the company at a huge profit with an estimated asking price of £900m.
We have approached Elysium Healthcare for their comments.
Note for any media organisations / newspapers
If you want to run a story about the private equity mental health scandal in the UK, please get in touch. We have extensive other information we can share with you about Elysium Healthcare (and finances).
We also have at least half a dozen parents (of patients in Rhodes Wood) willing to go on the record about the awful experiences their children have had – the abuse, the negligence, the lack of even basic care.