Rampton Secure Hospital
Encyclopedia
Rampton Secure Hospital is a high security psychiatric hospital near the village of Woodbeck between Retford
and Rampton
in the Bassetlaw District
of Nottinghamshire
, England
. It is situated 2.3 km (1.4 mi) west-south-west of Rampton village, at Ordnance Survey
grid reference SK 775 776 GB Grid.
under one of these classifications:
Rampton Hospital has a staff of about 2000 and provides the national service for patients with a learning disability, women and deaf people requiring high security care. It also provides services for men suffering from mental illness and personality disorder
. The hospital has a Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder Unit opened in 2004 as part of a national DSPD pilot (the Peaks Unit).
About a quarter of the patients have had no significant contact with the criminal justice system, but have been detained under the Mental Health Act and are considered to require treatment in conditions of high security owing to their "dangerous, violent or criminal propensities". Others have been convicted of an offence by the courts and either ordered to be detained in hospital or subsequently transferred there from prison.
in Berkshire
. The grounds occupy a former large common known as "Rampton Field".
The housing for the staff was built mostly in the 1920s and 1930s. There were several football fields, a rugby football
pitch, a cricket field, shop, staff club/pub, disco, library, tennis court
s, free indoor heated swimming pool
, bowls club. All of this was built for the staff; the housing was rented and only available for the staff. The staff had to leave the houses when they retired. This stopped in the 1980s, and after that the residents were allowed to stay on in the houses after retirement. In the 1990s staff were given the right to buy their houses from the Crown
. Houses were then bought at a discounted rate depending on how long the resident had worked at Rampton: the longer, the cheaper the house was to buy.
On 22 May 1979, Yorkshire Television
broadcast an exposé programme titled "Rampton, The Secret Hospital", showing the routinely severe mistreatment of Rampton patients by staff. A groundbreaking look inside the hitherto secret world of a 'special hospital' it has been cited in a "top ten" of television programmes which occasioned intense public debate and engendered far-reaching effects upon its subject area, and it got an International Emmy.
A follow-up television broadcast a few weeks later reported that its immediate effect within the hospital had so far amounted to a few scapegoat
prosecutions while the status quo
had continued largely as before, except that no staff member could trust another not to be an whistle-blower.
However, through the next 20 years, reforms to mental health service provision and the philosophy of care within institutions led to a more openly-scrutinized environment and patient care became subject to higher expectation and more rigorous inspection.
The glory days of working at Rampton and living in Woodbeck was probably 1960 to 1990. In the 1960s and 70s the Woodbeck estate was kept immaculate by gangs of patients who worked with staff and cut the hedges and kept the place looking magnificent. The staff club had regular famous people who would come and perform, singers, comedians the best folk. In 1977 a big party and do was put together for the Queen's silver jubilee
.
Further housing, known as Kellor Court, was built around 1980 but proved unsuccessful due to poor quality and was demolished around 2000. The 1980s also saw houses demolished in Woodbeck to make way for staff car parks, and open ground between the entry gate and the nearest hospital buildings was built over with an additional housing estate
for staff.
From about 1985 to about 2000, more and more things were stopped and removed from the staff, for example, uniforms, the library, shop, post office
, swimming pool
, sports day
gala
, pub, disco, video/film club, cricket pitch
, bowling green
and club, all were done away with. Woodbeck is now a desolate shadow of its former glory days. All there is now is a load of carparks, a few houses privately owned and some still rented, some such as Rees Row boarded up derelict for years. A creche
was built for child care but that was about it. Around the estate are many carparks and grassy areas with old apple and pear trees; these are all that is left from what was once gardens of the 1920s houses that the staff vacated in the 1980s so the buildings could be demolished.
In February 2000, Rampton Hospital was awarded a Charter Mark
award. This government scheme was designed to both reward excellence and encourage constant quality improvement. It is focused on the quality of service provided to users; in Rampton Hospital this included not only patients but also visitors and the general public.
The "special hospitals" of Broadmoor
, Rampton, and Ashworth
were formerly administered directly by the Home Office
and thus outside the National Health Service
(NHS). In April 2001, Rampton Hospital became part of the new Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust
. The Trust provides mental health and learning disability services including:
In May 2008, a group of patients lost their High Court
battle seeking to overturn the rule banning patients from smoking within the hospital.
Recently, some departments are being provided with uniforms that give staff a more professional look as well as identifiability.
Major developments at Rampton Hospital recently include the new building: the David Wilson Unit, for High Secure Learning Disability Services. This is a new impressive build to house patients in a better therapeutic environment to nurture, sustain and develop the treatments of the patients housed within.
Retford
Retford is a market town in Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands of England, located 31 miles from the city of Nottingham, and 23 miles west of Lincoln, in the district of Bassetlaw. The town is situated in a valley with the River Idle and the Chesterfield Canal running through the centre of the...
and Rampton
Rampton, Nottinghamshire
Rampton is a village and civil parish in Nottinghamshire, England. At the time of the 2001 census it had a population of 1,269. Its name came from Anglo-Saxon Ramm-tūn = "ram farmstead". It is located in the Trent valley north of Nottingham, in the Bassetlaw district 8 miles east of Retford...
in the Bassetlaw District
Bassetlaw
Bassetlaw is the northernmost district of Nottinghamshire, England, with a population according to the 2001 UK census of 107,713. The borough is predominantly rural, with two towns: Worksop, site of the borough offices, and Retford...
of Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire is a county in the East Midlands of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. It is situated 2.3 km (1.4 mi) west-south-west of Rampton village, at Ordnance Survey
Ordnance Survey
Ordnance Survey , an executive agency and non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom, is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, producing maps of Great Britain , and one of the world's largest producers of maps.The name reflects its creation together with...
grid reference SK 775 776 GB Grid.
Background
Rampton Hospital houses about 400 patients who have been detained under the Mental Health Act 1983Mental Health Act 1983
The Mental Health Act 1983 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which applies to people in England and Wales. It covers the reception, care and treatment of mentally disordered persons, the management of their property and other related matters...
under one of these classifications:
- Mental illness
- Psychopathic (personality) disorder
- (Severe) mental impairment, which is the legal term for what would now be called a learning disabilityLearning disabilityLearning disability is a classification including several disorders in which a person has difficulty learning in a typical manner, usually caused by an unknown factor or factors...
.
Rampton Hospital has a staff of about 2000 and provides the national service for patients with a learning disability, women and deaf people requiring high security care. It also provides services for men suffering from mental illness and personality disorder
Personality disorder
Personality disorders, formerly referred to as character disorders, are a class of personality types and behaviors. Personality disorders are noted on Axis II of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-IV-TR of the American Psychiatric Association.Personality disorders are...
. The hospital has a Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder Unit opened in 2004 as part of a national DSPD pilot (the Peaks Unit).
About a quarter of the patients have had no significant contact with the criminal justice system, but have been detained under the Mental Health Act and are considered to require treatment in conditions of high security owing to their "dangerous, violent or criminal propensities". Others have been convicted of an offence by the courts and either ordered to be detained in hospital or subsequently transferred there from prison.
History
Rampton Hospital opened in 1912 as an overflow facility for Broadmoor HospitalBroadmoor Hospital
Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in the Borough of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. It is the best known of the three high-security psychiatric hospitals in England, the other two being Ashworth and Rampton...
in Berkshire
Berkshire
Berkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
. The grounds occupy a former large common known as "Rampton Field".
The housing for the staff was built mostly in the 1920s and 1930s. There were several football fields, a rugby football
Rugby football
Rugby football is a style of football named after Rugby School in the United Kingdom. It is seen most prominently in two current sports, rugby league and rugby union.-History:...
pitch, a cricket field, shop, staff club/pub, disco, library, tennis court
Tennis court
A tennis court is where the game of tennis is played. It is a firm rectangular surface with a low net stretched across the center. The same surface can be used to play both doubles and singles.-Dimensions:...
s, free indoor heated swimming pool
Swimming pool
A swimming pool, swimming bath, wading pool, or simply a pool, is a container filled with water intended for swimming or water-based recreation. There are many standard sizes; the largest is the Olympic-size swimming pool...
, bowls club. All of this was built for the staff; the housing was rented and only available for the staff. The staff had to leave the houses when they retired. This stopped in the 1980s, and after that the residents were allowed to stay on in the houses after retirement. In the 1990s staff were given the right to buy their houses from the Crown
The Crown
The Crown is a corporation sole that in the Commonwealth realms and any provincial or state sub-divisions thereof represents the legal embodiment of governance, whether executive, legislative, or judicial...
. Houses were then bought at a discounted rate depending on how long the resident had worked at Rampton: the longer, the cheaper the house was to buy.
On 22 May 1979, Yorkshire Television
Yorkshire Television
Yorkshire Television, now officially known as ITV Yorkshire and sometimes unofficially abbreviated to YTV, is a British television broadcaster and the contractor for the Yorkshire franchise area on the ITV network...
broadcast an exposé programme titled "Rampton, The Secret Hospital", showing the routinely severe mistreatment of Rampton patients by staff. A groundbreaking look inside the hitherto secret world of a 'special hospital' it has been cited in a "top ten" of television programmes which occasioned intense public debate and engendered far-reaching effects upon its subject area, and it got an International Emmy.
A follow-up television broadcast a few weeks later reported that its immediate effect within the hospital had so far amounted to a few scapegoat
Scapegoat
Scapegoating is the practice of singling out any party for unmerited negative treatment or blame. Scapegoating may be conducted by individuals against individuals , individuals against groups , groups against individuals , and groups against groups Scapegoating is the practice of singling out any...
prosecutions while the status quo
Status quo
Statu quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" – literally "the state in which" – is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are...
had continued largely as before, except that no staff member could trust another not to be an whistle-blower.
However, through the next 20 years, reforms to mental health service provision and the philosophy of care within institutions led to a more openly-scrutinized environment and patient care became subject to higher expectation and more rigorous inspection.
The glory days of working at Rampton and living in Woodbeck was probably 1960 to 1990. In the 1960s and 70s the Woodbeck estate was kept immaculate by gangs of patients who worked with staff and cut the hedges and kept the place looking magnificent. The staff club had regular famous people who would come and perform, singers, comedians the best folk. In 1977 a big party and do was put together for the Queen's silver jubilee
Silver Jubilee
A Silver Jubilee is a celebration held to mark a 25th anniversary. The anniversary celebrations can be of a wedding anniversary, ruling anniversary or anything that has completed a 25 year mark...
.
Further housing, known as Kellor Court, was built around 1980 but proved unsuccessful due to poor quality and was demolished around 2000. The 1980s also saw houses demolished in Woodbeck to make way for staff car parks, and open ground between the entry gate and the nearest hospital buildings was built over with an additional housing estate
Housing estate
A housing estate is a group of buildings built together as a single development. The exact form may vary from country to country. Accordingly, a housing estate is usually built by a single contractor, with only a few styles of house or building design, so they tend to be uniform in appearance...
for staff.
From about 1985 to about 2000, more and more things were stopped and removed from the staff, for example, uniforms, the library, shop, post office
Post office
A post office is a facility forming part of a postal system for the posting, receipt, sorting, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies...
, swimming pool
Swimming pool
A swimming pool, swimming bath, wading pool, or simply a pool, is a container filled with water intended for swimming or water-based recreation. There are many standard sizes; the largest is the Olympic-size swimming pool...
, sports day
Sports day
Sports days, sometimes referred to as Field Day, are events staged by many schools and offices in which people take part in competitive sporting activities, often with the aim of winning trophies or prizes...
gala
Gala
-Events and festivities:*A gala, a festivity *A swimming gala is a British/South African term for an amateur swimming competition, often known as a swimming carnival in Australia....
, pub, disco, video/film club, cricket pitch
Cricket pitch
In the game of cricket, the cricket pitch consists of the central strip of the cricket field between the wickets - 1 chain or 22 yards long and 10 feet wide. The surface is very flat and normally covered with extremely short grass though this grass is soon removed by wear at the ends of the...
, bowling green
Bowling green
A bowling green is a finely-laid, close-mown and rolled stretch of lawn for playing the game of lawn bowls.Before 1830, when Edwin Beard Budding invented the lawnmower, lawns were often kept cropped by grazing sheep on them...
and club, all were done away with. Woodbeck is now a desolate shadow of its former glory days. All there is now is a load of carparks, a few houses privately owned and some still rented, some such as Rees Row boarded up derelict for years. A creche
Day care
Child care or day care is care of a child during the day by a person other than the child's legal guardians, typically performed by someone outside the child's immediate family...
was built for child care but that was about it. Around the estate are many carparks and grassy areas with old apple and pear trees; these are all that is left from what was once gardens of the 1920s houses that the staff vacated in the 1980s so the buildings could be demolished.
In February 2000, Rampton Hospital was awarded a Charter Mark
Charter Mark
The Customer Service Excellence, is an accreditation for organisations and an independent validation of achievement.-History:...
award. This government scheme was designed to both reward excellence and encourage constant quality improvement. It is focused on the quality of service provided to users; in Rampton Hospital this included not only patients but also visitors and the general public.
The "special hospitals" of Broadmoor
Broadmoor Hospital
Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in the Borough of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. It is the best known of the three high-security psychiatric hospitals in England, the other two being Ashworth and Rampton...
, Rampton, and Ashworth
Ashworth Hospital
Ashworth Hospital is a high security psychiatric hospital at Maghull in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, England.Ashworth is one of only three high-security specialist psychiatric hospitals in England and Wales, along with Rampton and Broadmoor, that exist to work with people who...
were formerly administered directly by the Home Office
Home Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
and thus outside the National Health Service
National Health Service (England)
The National Health Service or NHS is the publicly funded healthcare system in England. It is both the largest and oldest single-payer healthcare system in the world. It is able to function in the way that it does because it is primarily funded through the general taxation system, similar to how...
(NHS). In April 2001, Rampton Hospital became part of the new Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust
NHS Trust
A National Health Service trust provides services on behalf of the National Health Service in England and NHS Wales.The trusts are not trusts in the legal sense but are in effect public sector corporations. Each trust is headed by a board consisting of executive and non-executive directors, and is...
. The Trust provides mental health and learning disability services including:
- Community forensic service to NottinghamshireNottinghamshireNottinghamshire is a county in the East Midlands of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west...
- Medium-secure services provided by Arnold LodgeArnold LodgeArnold Lodge is a medium secure psychiatric hospital situated in Leicester, England, but being part of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust. It was opened in July 1983 and an extension with 30 extra beds was opened in 2007....
and Wathwood Hospital to patients from the Trent region - A high-security service at Rampton Hospital for all NHS regions
In May 2008, a group of patients lost their High Court
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...
battle seeking to overturn the rule banning patients from smoking within the hospital.
Recently, some departments are being provided with uniforms that give staff a more professional look as well as identifiability.
Major developments at Rampton Hospital recently include the new building: the David Wilson Unit, for High Secure Learning Disability Services. This is a new impressive build to house patients in a better therapeutic environment to nurture, sustain and develop the treatments of the patients housed within.
Notable patients
- Beverley Allitt
- Ian Huntley
- Frank "Mad Axeman" Mitchell
- Mark RowntreeMark RowntreeMark Rowntree is a British spree killer who was committed to a mental hospital after he admitted killing four people at random in the town of Bingley, West Yorkshire, during late 1975 and early 1976....
- Charles BronsonCharles Bronson (prisoner)Charles Bronson is a Welsh criminal often referred to in the British press as the "most violent prisoner in Britain"....
See also
- BroadmoorBroadmoor HospitalBroadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in the Borough of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. It is the best known of the three high-security psychiatric hospitals in England, the other two being Ashworth and Rampton...
and AshworthAshworth HospitalAshworth Hospital is a high security psychiatric hospital at Maghull in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, England.Ashworth is one of only three high-security specialist psychiatric hospitals in England and Wales, along with Rampton and Broadmoor, that exist to work with people who...
are the two other high-security mental hospitals in England. - Carstairs State HospitalState Hospital for Scotland and Northern IrelandThe State Hospital for Scotland and Northern Ireland is a psychiatric hospital providing care and treatment in conditions of high security for around 140 patients from Scotland and Northern Ireland who need to be detained in hospital under conditions of special security that can only be provided...
is the equivalent facility for Scotland and Northern Ireland.