A NEW £700,000 mental health unit at Burnley General Hospital has remained unused for nearly three months because health bosses can't recruit the staff to run it.

The psychiatric intensive care unit was officially opened on December 17 by Professor Rob Kerwin from the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital in London.

But the purpose-built unit remains empty and unused because of the national difficulty in recruiting trained staff. And it will be next month at the earliest before it can be partially opened.

The six bed unit is designed to enable the most dependent mental health patients to be treated in a protective and supportive environment.

Today Burnley MP Peter Pike said he would discuss the failure to recruit specialist nursing staff with Burnley health bosses this week.

He said: "I was unaware of the difficulty but I am meeting the chairman of the Trust, Coun Azhar Ali, and this is an issue I will bring up.

"We are in a situation where the new Lancashire wide mental health trust will be taking over at the end of March. That will be focused on these issues.

" Burnley needs this new unit and I would wish to see it in full operation. There is a national problem over staff recruitment in this field and I will certainly ask the chairman and chief executive for an update on Friday."

At the official opening Professor Kerwin spoke of the importance of it being properly staffed before it was used.

He spoke of staff being a self contained "family" unit and not comprised of people working in other parts of the hospital being brought in for a particular number of hours a week.

Today, Burnley Health Care Trust chief executive David Chew said: "We got funding from the regional NHS to develop the facility but there is a national shortage in specialist mental health staff.

"We had to spend the money and we were hoping to be able to open the unit in January, but that was not possible so we are now looking at March."

He said the unit was in line with national guidelines for treating people with serious mental health problems and those patients who would be using the service were currently cared for on the acute psychiatric wards, pending the unit's opening, but that was not ideal.

He said: "Professor Kerwin opened the unit because he is a very busy man and often out of the country so we 'grabbed him when we could'."

The original idea had been for Burnley and Blackburn trusts to be served by one unit which opened at Queens Park Hospital in Blackburn about three years ago.

But Mr Chew said Burnley had struggled to get its patients' accommodation in the Blackburn unit and so it was decided to develop a second facility in Burnley.

The latest position is that eleven untrained staff have been recruited in addition to the team leader Lorraine Nuttall, who commissioned the unit.

Mr Chew said: "At the present time we are hoping to recruit two trained staff which would enable us to open two beds toward the end of March."