POLICE have been condemned for a “disorganised” search operation which allowed a suicide victim to lay undiscovered in a hospital bathroom for nearly a week.

Jason Hearn, 22, of Branch Road, Park Street, was found dead in a disused toilet and shower room at Watford General Hospital on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 – four days after he absconded from a ward and was reported missing by hospital staff.

Hertfordshire Coroner’s Court heard this week how the popular motorcycle mechanic and driver managed to re-enter the hospital’s Acute Admissions Unit (AAU), take his own life and remain undiscovered behind an “out of order” sign.

The court heard how Mr Hearn had been taken to the hospital’s A&E department after suffering a potential nervous breakdown at his mother’s Abbots Langley home on Saturday, May 2.

While in the hospital, the normally quiet and placid man, who had been struggling with symptoms of depression and anxiety, became distressed and fled from its A & E department, trailing an array of medical wires and tubes behind him.

After running into the street outside he was restrained by police officers, detained under the Mental Health Act and taken back to the hospital.

The inquest hearing, which lasted for two days, sought to explain what happened next: how a man who should have been prevented from leaving the hospital without evaluation by specialist psychiatric doctors, was transferred to a standard ward and allowed simply to walk out – effectively discharging himself.

But just as the much-criticised police search was getting underway in the early hours of Sunday, May 3, Mr Hearn may well already have been dead.

A succession of failings in the police search, the court heard, would in all probability not have saved Mr Hearn’s life, but undoubtedly led to a lengthy delay in the discovery of his body, which only happened when a nurse went to investigate a bad smell in the disused and locked cubical – closed because of drainage problems.

Mr Hearn’s earlier (totally out of character) behaviour had alarmed nursing staff so much that when he fled the hospital shortly after 9pm they immediately called the police out of fears for his safety.

However, a series of communication breakdowns meant he was classified only as a low risk missing person, meaning fewer resources were applied to the case and less stringent searches and procedures conducted.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission, which was called into investigate the case, will release its full findings in the coming days. Some details of its damming conclusions, however, were aired in court.

Describing the search as “disjointed and disorganised”, the report added: “Not one single officer took responsibility for the search for Mr Hearn.”

The problems appear to have started at the end of the evening shift, when a new officer with no knowledge of the day’s events visited Mr Hearn’s mother to complete a missing person’s report The officer, speaking under oath, said he knew nothing that would lead him to believe Mr Hearn was a danger to himself.

Detective Inspector Duncan Sales, a specialist missing persons officer, explained that the risk was upgraded to medium the following day but that the search was focussed primarily on the St Albans (Central) area of the county, rather than Watford – where Mr Hearn was last seen and his body found.

He also explained how vital information (including a picture of Mr Hearn) was not fed through a centralised computer system in the correct way – partly because of the initial low risk analysis and partly because of a lack of technical knowhow.

Changes, he explained, had been made to the missing persons protocol since Mr Hearn’s death and a full internal review completed.

On Wednesday, a succession of witnesses also explained a potentially fatal breakdown in communication between the hospital and police; with officers believing that medical staff were fully aware of a so-called Section 136 detention (when a police officer detains a member of the public for their own safety under the Mental Health Act) and a succession of doctors and nurses claiming that they were not.

Under the terms of a joint protocol between the police and West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust officers should have remained with Mr Hearn until a psychiatrically trained doctor had assessed him.

The court heard, however, that the officers left after receiving explicit instructions from a doctor.

But that doctor, and no fewer than four other medical staff, deny that they were informed by the police of the Section 136 document.

Hospital managers also faced questions about lax security procedures, which allowed Mr Hearn (in full view of CCTV) to wander back into the AAU through a security door behind a member of staff.

They said that a number of key changes had been made since the tragedy but admitted that the hospital itself was not subjected to a thorough search because Mr Hearn did not fit the criteria of a missing patient – because he had, effectively, discharged himself.

Mr Thomas, who recorded a verdict of suicide, said none of the issues raised at the hearing would have made a difference to the fact that Mr Hearn took his own life “whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed”. Time of death, he ruled, was most likely to have been on Saturday night of early Sunday morning.