FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH
Some elements of care ‘still in the doldrums’
In the February 2023 The Network, two of the architects for Ireland’s new National Forensic Mental Health Service Hospital in Portrane, explained how the new secure facility was designed to support new models of care that promote recovery through an active therapeutic programme. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, recently met with Harry Kennedy, Adjunct Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Trinity College, University of Dublin, who – as Executive Clinical director of Ireland’s National Forensic Mental Health Service from 2002 to 2022, had substantial input into the facility’s design – to discover more about his thinking on optimal forensic mental healthcare.
Professor Kennedy has recently retired from the HSE, but still lectures and teaches on forensic mental healthcare. After qualifying in medicine from University College Dublin and the Mater Hospital in 1980, he then completed an intern year in the two professorial units at the Mater, before postgraduate training in general and respiratory medicine in London – at the Brompton and Hammersmith Hospitals, Royal Postgraduate Medical School. Then, from 1985, he trained in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry, and at Broadmoor Hospital, up until 1992. Also Honorary Skou Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at University of Aarhus in Denmark, and Visiting Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’, he was formerly Clinical director, North London Forensic Service, and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School, University College London.
Reforms The Professor was heavily involved in the reform and re-organisation of the Central Mental Hospital, Dundrum, from becoming Executive Clinical director through to the completion, in 2020, of the new purpose- built secure forensic hospital in Portrane (The Network – February 2023), and the transfer of patients from old to the new, completed last November. During his time at the Central Mental Hospital – on its completion in 1850 one of Europe’s first forensic mental healthcare ‘asylums’ – he also developed what became known as the DUNDRUM Toolkit – and, working with colleagues, wrote new Models of Care for the Irish National Forensic Mental Health Services. He also established systematic prison in-reach services, helped develop a forensic child and adolescent service, a forensic mental health and developmental disorders service, and an extended women’s service, and contributed substantially – co-writing a 300-page
THE NETWORK | NOVEMBER 2023
Above: London’s famous Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, where Prof. Kennedy undertook part of his training in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.
Right: Professor Kennedy said of the Model of Care he and colleagues in the Irish forensic mental healthcare service had developed: “I always explain that our written Model of Care is 13,000 words; you can read it in an hour with a cup of coffee, but by then you’ll have a much better idea of what we’re doing here and why.”
brief for the architects – to the design of Ireland’s new National Forensic Mental Health Service Hospital in Portrane. Having initially worked in respiratory
and chest medicine at London’s Brompton and Hammersmith Hospitals early in his medical career, he decided to switch to psychiatry because – as he put it – ‘psychiatry was a particularly interesting field to work in at that time, while my background as an undergraduate had included a lot of physiology research while
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