Emergency mental health clinic to close

Patients with schizophrenia and other illnesses have been protesting for months against the closure of the Maudsley Clinic in Denmark Hill.

Treatment stopped there in May but the doors stayed open to direct patients to the A&E department at neighbouring King's College Hospital.

Now Lambeth primary care trust has said the clinic will shut completely by next March. The closure was driven by funding cuts last year.

Chairwoman Caroline Hewitt said: "It has been an extremely difficult decision, but on balance we believe that the right service arrangements are now in place to allow us to finally decommission the remaining services provided at the emergency clinic."

Lambeth and Southwark has the highest level of psychosis in the country.

The row over the future of the clinic has raged for months, with nurses at King's complaining of an increased workload.

Tessa Jowell, the Minister for London and Dulwich and West Norwood MP, joined the campaign to save it and Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat MP for North Southwark and Bermondsey, said: "We still do not have an adequate replacement."

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of mental health charity Sane, said: "It was the one place people could go of their own accord to find refuge and be assessed. It was a place where they could find skilled people who understood and could make them safe."

She said A&E units were not designed to cope with mental patients.