What happened
On 17 July 2016 Myha Grant was admitted to the Bracton Centre near Dartford, a medium secure forensic unit run by Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. He had schizoaffective disorder, antisocial personality disorder and a history of violence.
He forced his way into the ward kitchen, pushed healthcare assistant Francis Barrett through a door and stabbed him repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Psychiatric nurse Julius Falomo shouted for help and was stabbed around 17 times. A third member of staff was trapped while Grant set light to newspapers, clothing and bedding. Armed police subdued him.
Both nurses were airlifted to King’s College Hospital. Barrett needed several operations before a phased return. Falomo was off work until March 2017. The court said it was astonishing that nobody had been killed.
The outcome
Grant was sentenced to 19 years.
In June 2018 Oxleas pleaded guilty to two charges under sections 2 and 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. On 20 December 2018 Mr Justice Edis QC fined the trust £300,000 with £28,000 in costs. He reduced an initial £1.5m fine so as not to penalise people who depend on the trust’s services, and described its knife control procedures as “ad hoc and inadequate”.
After the case the trust told the BBC it had introduced new search policies and a dedicated safety manager.
What went wrong
The HSE found that no patient specific risk assessment had been made for Grant before his admission, though the unit routinely took patients at high risk of violence.
The second finding was the kitchen. Knives were in use on an acute ward, staff went in and out several times a day, and no instruction told them what to do about the blades. The sources record no training in search techniques, and a nurse had been doused with boiling water in an earlier incident.
What it teaches
Environmental controls are staff safety controls. A locked knife cupboard, a search routine, a rule about who goes into a kitchen and with whom: all of it reads as administration until it is the only thing between a worker and a blade.
The risk assessment is the other half. A unit that takes high risk patients as routine still has to assess the individual in front of it. “We take high risk patients” describes the unit, not the man being admitted.
A ward is not a lone working system, and this page does not claim it was one. What the case shows is the same gap in a different building: a worker attacked in a room whose risks were managed by habit rather than by procedure.
Questions for the room
- What in your workplace is controlled by procedure rather than by your own judgement, and when were you last trained in it?
- The unit took high risk patients as routine. What would a patient specific assessment have told the staff on that ward?
- A nurse was scalded in an earlier incident. What happened to that report?
- Which room in your building would you not want to be cornered in, and what has been done about it?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. Four sources were read in full, BBC News, the Croner case report, National Health Executive and DWF. The HSE convictions history record could not be loaded.
The sources do not say how the ward was staffed that day, or how long it took colleagues to reach the kitchen, so neither is stated.
Our lone working training covers the environmental and assessment controls that a worker on their own depends on.
Sources
- BBC News, 20 December 2018 · https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-46633639
- Croner-i case report, HSE v NHS Oxleas Trust, 2018 · https://app.croneri.co.uk/law-and-guidance/case-reports/health-and-safety-executive-v-nhs-oxleas-trust-2018-central-criminal?topic=376
- DWF, 18 February 2019 · https://dwfgroup.com/en/news-and-insights/insights/2019/2/nhs-trust-fined
- National Health Executive, 4 January 2019 · https://www.nationalhealthexecutive.com/Patient-Safety/nhs-trust-fined-300000-after-two-employees-repeatedly-stabbed-by-patient
Reviewed 20 October 2026.