A SIREN should be installed at a psychiatric hospital to alert people to missing patients, says a parish council chairman.

Cllr David Weaver made his plea following a series of escapes from Fair Mile Hospital in Cholsey, the latest of which happened at the weekend.

Cholsey Parish Council urged the 200-patient hospital to install a siren just over a year ago, but the hospital has kept its cascade system.

Under this system, telephone calls and faxed messages are sent to certain people, such as the police, shopkeepers and pub landlords, as well as Cholsey Parish Council, who then pass on the message about a missing patient.

Ten patients detained at Fair Mile under the Mental Health Act have escaped in the past three months. On Saturday morning, an unnamed 37-year-old male patient from Oxford, who is not believed to be dangerous, failed to come back to the hospital within an hour from an unescorted walk. Here turned after turning up in Great Yarmouth later that day.

Another patient, Nicholas McDermott, 38, disappeared from the hospital - which is due to close in 2001 - on April 7. He, whose relatives live in Leicestershire, was discovered hanged from the tiller of a boat on the Thames four days later. The cascade system was introduced at the hospital in 1996, following concerns about the Wallingford Clinic - a medium-secure unit within its grounds. It followed an assault on a three-year-old girl by a patient at the unit who was allowed out unsupervised for a therapy session.

Cllr Weaver said: "We really need immediacy. For sheer immediacy, the siren is the most obvious thing to have.

"I would hope that a siren would be used for any patient who has gone missing. We should be made aware as quickly as possible if this is the case."

He added: "Escapes seem to be a regular thing.

"Overall, we are very concerned and it's something that we hold dear to ourselves, because we want to feel secure."

But Chris Birdsall, spokesman for the West Berkshire Priority Care Service NHS Trust, said: a siren would cause confusion and needless worry in the community.

"We have serious doubts about a siren, not least because if a person goes absent without leave, they are very often a long way out of the area by the time a siren would be used."

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