Leicestershire Partnership Trust has told the Lampard Inquiry why it abandoned a bedroom monitoring system that a neighbouring trust is expanding across every inpatient unit.

NHS Mental Health Monitoring System Faces Scrutiny After Study Retraction

A monitoring system that reads a patient’s pulse and breathing through a wall-mounted sensor sounds like precisely the kind of quiet technical progress the NHS needs more of. Fewer night-time checks, less disturbed sleep, safety maintained without a member of staff opening a door. 

That was the pitch behind Oxevision when Leicestershire Partnership Trust (LPT) began piloting it in December 2022. Two and a half years later, the trust has told the Lampard Inquiry it will not use the system at all, while Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is rolling contactless monitoring out to all eleven of its inpatient units by 2027. 

That split matters on its own. It matters more alongside two developments that have had far less attention, the key academic evidence underpinning Oxevision’s safety and cost claims has since been retracted, and the manufacturer’s own adoption figures no longer stand up to independent scrutiny.

How Many NHS Trusts Actually Use Oxevision

Oxehealth, the Oxford-based company behind Oxevision, and Oxford University Innovation have both marketed the technology as installed in roughly half of England’s NHS mental health trusts. That figure has underpinned much of the coverage of the system, including reporting from the current inquiry hearings. Campaign group Stop Oxevision disputes it. 

Using Freedom of Information requests submitted since 2023 to track installations and removals across every mental health trust in England, the group now puts the true figure at twenty trusts, or roughly forty per cent, arguing the fifty per cent claim has not kept pace with a steady run of trusts uninstalling the system. Neither figure has been independently verified by NHS England, but the gap between them is itself notable in a sector where digital procurement decisions increasingly hinge on stated levels of peer adoption.

The Economic Case for Oxevision Has Been Retracted

More consequential is what has happened to the published evidence base. A 2024 study in PLOS Digital Health, based on service evaluations across five NHS mental health trusts, concluded that vision-based monitoring produced cash-releasing savings and a positive return on investment, findings subsequently cited by the Healthcare Financial Management Association and referenced in NHS Innovation Accelerator materials. The journal has since retracted the paper. Its editors found that aspects of the study design were not adequately justified, and separately noted that the authors’ competing interests statement failed to disclose that Oxehealth developed and markets the very system being evaluated, despite that link being clear elsewhere in the article. For any integrated care board or care technology company weighing procurement decisions on the strength of published health economics, a retraction of this kind should prompt a second look at what evidence actually survives scrutiny.

What Bereaved Families Have Told the Inquiry

The Lampard Inquiry has now heard directly from families who lost relatives while they were being monitored. Tammy Smith, whose daughter Sophie Alderman died by suicide in 2022 at Rochford Hospital while under Oxevision surveillance, told the inquiry she does not believe Oxevision is effective in keeping patients safe.

A patient identified only as Sophina, describing life under the camera, said it was the first thing you see when you open your eyes. Lawyers representing more than 150 families at the inquiry, including Nina Ali of Hodge Jones and Allen, have described occasions where staff appeared to substitute the technology for in-person checks, including cases where alarms were muted, overlooked or misinterpreted before a death occurred. 

Selen Cavcav of the charity Inquest has argued that surveillance of this kind can deepen distress in patients already contending with the loss of autonomy that comes with compulsory or voluntary treatment. Laura Cozens, patient safety lead for Oxevision’s operating company, has herself acknowledged to the inquiry that recording a patient around the clock could constitute a very significant invasion of privacy.

Two Neighbouring Trusts, One Unresolved Question

Set against that, LPT’s own pilot data is more mixed than damning. Andres Freire-Patino, the trust’s deputy director of mental health services, told the inquiry that sleep hygiene improved for some patients, but that the trust found no reduction in one-to-one observations, no evidence of released staff time, and no measurable fall in incidents or length of stay. Only 42 per cent of patients consented during the trust’s second, opt-in pilot. Derbyshire describes a similar consent process and reaches the opposite conclusion, saying the technology helps patients rest without disturbance and that consent is reviewed at regular intervals throughout a stay. Both trusts are describing broadly the same product. Neither has resolved what counts as genuine consent inside a locked ward, where the power imbalance between patient and institution is already severe. Hat Porter of Stop Oxevision put it to the inquiry directly: the voices raising concern are loud, they said, they are just not listened to.

What This Means for Patients, Families and Providers

For patients and families, the practical stakes are less about the sensor technology itself than about what happens around it: whether consent is genuinely sought and revisited, whether an alert reaching a screen still results in a person walking into the room, and whether a monitored patient in crisis experiences the camera as protective or as one more loss of control. For care providers and technology suppliers working in adjacent fields, from supported living to domiciliary remote monitoring, the lesson is procedural rather than technical. A consent model that satisfies NHS England’s human rights framework on paper needs to survive contact with a frightened patient at 3am, and an economic case built on a single retracted study is no longer a case at all.