HEALTH bosses today said they had already launched a plan to make sure another suicide tragedy does not happen in hospital.

Nurses told the inquest into the death of John Baxendale there was a lack of resources.

They said there was no specific guidelines to deal with patients thought to be at risk of harming themselves.

Anne Asher, acute services manager for Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Health Care NHS Trust, said today: "There is no written protocol in place for A and E.

"We have done a trawl of local trusts and there is nothing in place there either, but we have been working on one since this incident happened.

"We have a serious incident policy which came into place immediately after the incident.

"An internal inquiry was opened but the recommendations have not come through officially.

"The recommendations will go to the chief executive in September and will be formally implemented after that." She said that since the tragedy, they had already tried to improve the way at-risk patients were dealt by a number of initiatives.

"These include enhanced staffing at night for observation with, hopefully, one person specific to watch over patients, additional training on assessing mental health and suicide risks and risk assessments to be carried out on rooms.

"We have never had anything like this before. The clinical director is not aware of any other suicide in an A and E locally, although people have been discharged and then gone on to do it.

"This man was in the most easily observable room and the cord was only short - but he managed to do it. He was obviously very determined to do it, which is very sad, and the staff have been devastated by what happened."

A Department of Health spokesman said there were no national guidelines to hospitals on dealing with potential suicides. It was up to individual trusts how they dealt with those thought to be at risk.