Scraping the barrel when it comes to personnel

Another mental health nurse is behind bars after it was found he'd accessed child pornography sites on a computer he'd been using at the Charlton Centre, a residential home for the elderly in Batley, West Yorkshire.

The Yorkshire Post headline was "Mental health nurse had 40,000 indecent images of children". The story goes on to reveal the mental health nurse, Ivor Foster, had checked himself in to a psychiatric hospital called Fieldhead Hospital prior to the stuff being found on the computer he'd been using at the care home. He'd gone to Fieldhead because he was depressed. That means a depressed nurse was looking after people in a residential home, people who suffer from Alzheimer's diseases or dementia.

I regularly read all this stuff about psychiatric patients and their vulnerabilities, and then I read about the quality of the people looking after them. If this is the quality of personnel looking after people with mental illness, and Mr Foster isn't the only blot on the mental health nurse landscape, there must be a barrel that doesn't have a bottom after being scraped long and hard.

Foster was jailed for 14 months after he admitted 21 offences of possessing or making indecent images.