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.

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