The main psychiatric hospital for children from Brighton and Hove and the whole of Sussex is to close within weeks after a critical inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The closure of Chalkhill, in Haywards Heath, will be temporary, according to Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (SPFT), which runs the unit. But the trust could not say when it would reopen although the closure would last for months rather than weeks.
Three patients were still being treated at Chalkhill, councillors were told last week, with the aim of discharging them or finding them an inpatient bed elsewhere before the unit closes.
It opened about 20 years ago and used to have 18 beds. At the time of the decision to close the unit, in the summer, it had just 12 beds. It may have even fewer when it reopens.
The CQC has yet to publish its report after inspecting Chalkhill in late August but when it published its previous report, two years ago, it also published a press release.
It said: “The CQC has lowered the rating for Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s child and adolescent mental health (CAMHS) ward at Chalkhill from good to requires improvement following an inspection in June that found improvements were needed.
“This inspection was carried out because CQC had received concerns regarding
- the safety and wellbeing of young people using the service
- high levels of incidents leading to harm
- staff training and competence
- low staffing numbers
- ineffective observations of young people
- poor leadership and support
“Before the inspection the trust along with the commissioners of the service had identified some safety concerns and had an action plan in place to address them.
“However, the action plan had not been fully implemented and some of these areas remained a concern during this inspection.”
The report said: “Staff weren’t always able to keep young people safe from avoidable harm. There were high levels of repeated incidents which caused harm and potential harm to young people.”
SPFT chief operating officer John Child spoke about the impending closure at Hove Town Hall at a meeting of Brighton and Hove City Council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee last Wednesday (19 November).
He said: “We’re seeing young people with much more complex problems and in need of a greater level of care. We’re concerned that the way that they can be treated in Chalkhill doesn’t meet their needs.
“We have some key clinical vacancies. A long-serving consultant psychiatrist has retired and we have vacancies in some of our key nurse leadership roles.
“We want to recruit a new team and complete some organisational development training with them.
“We have been awarded some money to make the building better and it’s good to do (the work) while there are no children there.”
Conservative councillor Emma Hogan, a consultant psychiatrist, said: “It sounds as if Chalkhill has been in dire straits for quite some time – the CQC visit in 2023 and then the chronic issues to 2025. Do you honestly think that all the issues are rectifiable?”
Mr Child said: “Yes, I do. But I think that they require close attention and considerable work which is why we made the decision that we did.
“It’s a very difficult decision and we recognise that it has significant impacts on young people and their families for a period of time and while placing people out of area.
“We did not think that we would be able to make the improvements with the service and the team in situ. It requires a dedicated pause and stocktake.
“There is a chronicity to the challenges. It’s not untypical of similar units, with the challenges that they face, with the staffing issues that they face, with the changes in presentation.
“But it’s our service. We need to be accountable for it and we need to make those changes.”
In the meantime, the trust would still have a duty to admit children and young people who needed inpatient care. It would probably have to rely on out-of-area private providers. And it added that this would almost certainly prove costly.
Mr Child said: “Tier 4 beds nationally are still under pressure – sometimes with none available across the whole country (and) recruitment, particularly in the area of CAMHS, is a national challenge.”
He hoped that opening a new service with a fresh start would prove more attractive when trying to recruit. He acknowledged that, previously, the unit had relied too much and too often on agency staff.
A report to the council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee said: “SPFT plans to temporarily close Chalkhill Hospital, an inpatient acute unit for young people located in Hayward’s Heath.
“The temporary closure will enable SPFT to redesign the clinical service model for the hospital, to recruit staff and to make physical improvements to the building.”
Chalkhill delivers a “tier 4 general adolescent unit inpatient mental health service” as part of the child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) for the area.
The report said: “Chalkhill is run by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (SPFT) and is a 12-bed mixed gender inpatient unit where children and young people are admitted if they require assessment and treatment for acute mental health needs.
“The unit is located in the grounds of the Princess Royal Hospital, Hayward’s Heath.
“In October 2023, Chalkhill was inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the CQC’s inspection report made a number of recommendations for improvement.
“Subsequently, SPFT has sought to implement these recommendations, alongside internally identified improvement actions.
“The CQC carried out a further unannounced inspection in August and raised concerns regarding patient safety.
“Due to lack of sustained improvement, the trust made the decision to temporarily close Chalkhill.
“The temporary closure will allow the trust to
- Redesign the clinical model to ensure the clinical offer is suitable to meet the needs of the children and young people who require inpatient care, following changes in overall acuity and in clinical presentation taking into account national and regional best practice
- Recruit to key clinical leadership roles including the consultant psychiatrist / responsible clinician and nurse consultants
- Complete a programme of organisational development for the new leadership team once recruitment has been completed
- Undertake estates work to improve the inpatient environment of Chalkhill to ensure it reflects the needs of the patient group
“The trust has made additional investments in community services to enhance opportunities to treat young people at home while Chalkhill is closed.
“For young people who do require inpatient admission, SPFT is able to place (them) into young people’s units in Surrey, Hampshire and Kent and the processes of bed searching remain unchanged.
“The nearest unit for people from Brighton and Hove is located at Horley, on the Surrey and Sussex border.
“No young people will be placed on adult wards.
“At the time of writing, Chalkhill currently has three young people admitted.
“There are detailed clinical plans in place to support either community discharge or transfer to another inpatient unit as required by the proposed closure date in early December 2025.
“There is currently no date set for Chalkhill to reopen. The reopening will be dependent on planned building works and recruitment to key clinical roles.
“However, SPFT has been clear that the closure is temporary and it fully intends to reopen.
“It is anticipated that bed numbers in the refreshed unit will be similar to current levels although the details of this will be determined by the new clinical model.
“Given the uncertainty about the reopening date, current Chalkhill staff will be permanently rather than temporarily redeployed across other clinical services.”
After the CQC inspection in 2023 the watchdog issued “a warning notice to focus the trust’s attention on making rapid and widespread improvements regarding good governance”.
The CQC’s deputy director of operations in the south, Neil Cox, said: “When we inspected Chalkhill, we found a decline in the quality of leadership at the service which was having an impact on the level of care being provided to the young people using this service.
“It was incredibly concerning some young people had come to harm and others had been put at risk because leaders had poor oversight and didn’t always have good enough systems in place to keep them safe.
“Leaders didn’t always manage risks well and they didn’t learn from incidents when things went wrong to stop them from happening again.
“Also, despite the trust having an action plan in place, we didn’t feel assured those improvements were happening quickly enough.
“We also saw there were signs of a closed culture at the service. The trust didn’t do everything they could to ensure they were being open and transparent and young people told us they didn’t always feel safe or supported to raise concerns.
“Staff confirmed this, as well as telling us the impact this had on their morale as a result. Leaders need to do more to listen to the experiences of people using the service as well as to staff to make improvements.”
Earlier this year, the CQC issued spoke out about other services provided by SPFT, saying: “We served a warning notice on Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust on Friday 11 July 2025 for failing to ensure that the care and treatment of patients who used the mental health crisis services and health-based places of safety received care that was consistently safe, appropriate, met their needs, upheld their privacy and dignity rights and protected them from avoidable harm.
“The governance systems in place were not robust and did not provide adequate oversight and ongoing monitoring of the quality and safety of care provided.”
The CQC said that its concerns related to
- The trust’s Department of Psychiatry
- Langley Green Hospital in Crawley
- Meadowfield Hospital in Worthing
- Mill View Hospital in Hove
- Woodlands in Hastings
SPFT chief operating officer John Child earns approximately £150,000 per year along with all the so called doctors and staff .
And yet vulnerable children are at extreme risk and they still get rich off the back of it .
Not sure how you sleep at night .
But just go and check on these children that need a bit of love and care . Simple
And don’t go home until you have sorted it on those wages
Benjamin
when a man has reason to request a DNA paternity test in a family court or for child support purposes, there is a significant chance he is not the biological father, with rates often falling within or exceeding the 20% range.
Key Statistics
Family Court/Disputed Paternity Cases: Studies specifically looking at cases where paternity was already in dispute or court-mandated show that the man is often not the biological father.
A 2008 study of UK Child Support Agency (CSA) cases found that of those resolved with DNA testing, between 10% and 19% of mothers had misidentified the biological father.
A review of international studies on disputed paternity found the incidence of the man not being the father ranged from 17% to 33%, with a median of 26.9%.
Brighton is at 25% as of 2018 DNA office the highest in the country.
Incase your maths not good that’s 1 in 4 as I have always maintained as I have experience of it and was informed personally while seeking a court ordered DNA results
Just to clarify for others reading: disputed-paternity cases aren’t representative of the general population. Peer-reviewed evidence puts misattributed paternity at low single digits, not twenty five percent. Court-ordered DNA tests naturally have a much higher rate because they’re the tiny subset where doubt already exists.
Here’s a savage but still humorous 200-word roast that hits hard without crossing into actual cruelty:
Benjamin, my man, at this point your replies have the same authenticity as a Wikipedia article run through a blender. You swoop into every conversation with that “Ah yes, I have just now learned this and must immediately pretend I’ve known it since birth” energy. It’s honestly impressive—you don’t just Google things, you speedrun them. If there were an Olympic event for typing a question into the search bar and then acting like a seasoned scholar, you’d bring home gold, silver, and bronze.
Every time you comment, I can almost see the reflection of your search results in your eyes. You don’t even paraphrase—your thoughts arrive pre-packaged like they’re sponsored by the first link Google spits out. We’re not talking research here; we’re talking copy-pasted enlightenment, lightly dusted with confidence and vibes.
And the best part? You deliver it with the swagger of someone revealing ancient secrets. Meanwhile, the rest of us are sitting here like, “Benjamin, my dude, that exact sentence is literally the second paragraph of the first result.”
But don’t worry—we appreciate your dedication. Someone has to keep Google’s traffic numbers up, and clearly, you’ve taken that responsibility personally.
“Here’s a savage but still humorous 200-word roast that hits hard without crossing into actual cruelty:”
If this service cannot cope with 3 patients, it is clearly not fit for purpose. I don’t think that closing it for a reset will solve this fundamental issue. CAMHS services are overburdened generally but the removal of this safety net is indicative of the failure of management to address basic issues. Waiting times for initial assessment and support are way to long. Concentrating on this dynamic will hopefully reduce the pressure on inpatient provision.
Cambs in Hove-is generally not a good unit at all.
Chalkhill should stay open.
Sussex Partnership were only in the papers last week for having a swanky awards ceremony at the Amex celebrating a handful of staff members across the trust doing a great job.
But yet, time and time again. (4 articles in the last month I’ve seen alone) They have failed both children and adults who access mental health support, through Sussex partnership and have had so many failures, unnecessary and avoidable deaths across the services. More specifically inpatient.
The trust is not learning, the trust is not trying to or implementing any change off the back of these failures and just continues to bury their head in the sand and turn a blind eye!
The CEO and the other senior staff in the trust need to be held accountable and removed from their post if they cannot and do not make change. It is not okay to receive a huge salary, bonuses and all the other perks while still continuing to fail children, young people, adults and older adults that come under their care. There really is no excuse. People are dying far too much because this trust continues to fail some of the most vulnerable people who need their help.
Just today another article is released of a young person dying prematurely. Placing a young person on an inappropriate ward for her declining mental health.
When are the people that have the power, authority and ability to change things, going to take action? When are they going change this failing system that isn’t working. The wards are not fit for purpose, the front line staff are exhausted, rundown and burnt out probably due to the complete lack of support from their senior colleagues, overflowing workload, endless waiting lists, no where to direct patients or turn them too within the community services because they don’t have enough treatment and recovery programs or therapy. So then these patients fall further and further usually leading to a crisis. But crisis services can’t manage either.
None of this can be sustained as it is. Sussex partnership apologise only to offer empty promises, lack of accountability and no change. This is exactly why places like Chalkhill are failing and being shut down.
Maybe it’s a good thing that it’s being closed for the foreseeable. The saddest thing of all with this closure, is the only people that will truly be affected once again by this. Are the children and young people who have to receive inpatient care out of area miles away from their family, friends and what they know. I’m sure that wont help or encourage the patients towards recovery. Added on, to an already scary situation that comes with patients being admitted to a mental health inpatient unit. It’s hard enough for adults , let alone are children and young people who are the future.
How do these senior staff members at the trust sleep at night.
Absolutely disgraceful and mind blowing.