The targets say this is one of the best NHS trusts in the country. But this doctor has turned whistle blower to reveal a shockingly different picture... To outsiders it seems like that rarest of things: a wildly successful NHS trust. South Essex Partnership Trust (SEPT) was awarded the top score of 'excellent' three years running by Government inspectors. Its chief executive, Dr Patrick Geoghegan OBE, is a Government favourite, recently named the NHS's Leader of the Year, and earned £200,000 last year, more than the Prime Minister. He even has a hospital unit named after him. The in-house magazine reported that, when unveiling the plaque in 2005, he had the 'surprise of his life' to find that admiring colleagues had secretly named it the Patrick Geoghegan Recovery Unit. It was, they said, an honour he 'richly deserved'. But not everyone is quite so enamoured of Dr Geoghegan's work. 'I wouldn't trust SEPT to take adequate care of a hamster,' says Dr Jennifer Blandford, who recently quit as a consultant for the trust. 'I would rather stick pins in my eyes than let any member of my family go to a psychiatric unit it runs, or receive outpatient psychological therapy from it. The gulf between SEPT's rhetoric and the reality is enormous.' She claims that suicidal patients are dying unnecessarily through neglect, that inadequately trained staff are allowed to treat seriously troubled people and that treatment is brutally rationed. Dr Blandford, 50, joined SEPT in February 2005 as head of the forensic psychology department. She worked for 13 years for Essex Police both in uniform and as a detective, but decided in 1995 to retrain as a clinical psychologist. However, her professional approach to the SEPT job, her third in the field, soon brought her into conflict with the trust management. Not long after getting the job, she discovered that two earlier staff appointees had misrepresented their qualifications, yet wrote crucial reports for mental health review tribunals. 'God knows how many patients were either released into the community or detained in hospital further based on their lack of clinical training, skill and experience,' she says. She alerted management, and although both members of staff eventually resigned, 'no disciplinary action was taken,' says Dr Blandford. And the more she learned about the prevailing culture, the more disillusioned she became. 'SEPT's patient care was sometimes like going back 30 years, a cross between One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Alice In Wonderland,' she says. 'Patients were often over-sedated, just to keep them quiet, or not readmitted even when clearly in dire need.' Dr Blandford found it near impossible to build a settled team. 'I went on holiday in 2006 and came back to find half my team had been made redundant, yet two of them were excellent,' she says. 'There seemed to be a culture of getting rid of good people just to keep others afraid.'