A PATIENT was caught by police after he escaped from Calderstones Hospital.

The man, from the hospital’s medium secure unit for mentally ill people, ran away from two members of staff while being escorted on a walk around its gardens in Whalley.

Hospital bosses said police were alerted in line with ‘standard procedures’ and the man was found about a mile away from the site within the hour on Saturday.

However, Russ Pearce, Calderstones’ chief executive, said the patient was not ‘an immediate danger’ to the public.

He said: “He had been assessed by his clinical team, who said it was okay for him to go out with staff, in essentially a public environment, because that is what our grounds are.

"The team would have decided he wasn’t an immediate danger to the public.”