Police have apprehended a patient who escaped from an NHS medium secure unit in Homerton on Wednesday.
Shane Hart, also known as Stephen Hart, went missing while on escorted leave from The John Howard Centre. Hart was convicted in 1994 of child kidnapping and taking a child without lawful authority.
The Sun reported in 2009 that Hart had “vanished after going to the loo alone” on a trip to Stratford shopping centre.
The John Howard Centre admits patients under various sections of the Mental Health Act and from the courts and Ministry of Justice. The Centre’s security procedures have come under fire in recent years after the Hackney Gazette revealed that 211 patients had “gone absent without leave” since 2001.
The East London NHS Foundation Trust, which runs The John Howard Centre, said that the majority of patients recorded as absent without leave had in fact returned to the facility within 24 hours.
A statement issued on Wednesday by East London NHS Foundation Trust said that leave from the facility is only granted after a “comprehensive risk assessment”.
But Shane Hart is one of a handful of patients with serious convictions to have escaped or gone missing from the facility without returning voluntarily.
Lerone Boye, a convicted killer, escaped from the facility in October 2013. Samuel Lee, who was convicted of raping a disabled woman, absconded while on unsupervised leave in June this year.
The trust’s statement said: “We would like to assure [residents] that the trust and our staff work hard to deliver safe services. As with any incident of this nature we will carry out a thorough review to identify lessons to be learned and take any appropriate actions.”
[…] This article was written for the Hackney Post, and can be seen in a slightly different form there http://hackneypost.co.uk/2014/10/16/missing-patient-apprehended/ […]
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