What happened
On the evening of 8 July 2013 a care worker was the only member of staff on duty at a residential home in Birkenhead, Wirral. Craig Cantwell, 29, who had learning difficulties and schizophrenia, asked her for paracetamol for a headache.
She took him upstairs to the medication room. He locked the door behind them and had stacked items against it. He pushed her into the drugs cabinet and told her to go into the adjoining bathroom, saying she would be safer in there because if she stayed in the room he would kill her. He then made a sexual demand and told her he was aroused.
She locked herself in the bathroom and tried to call her manager. The phone rang out. Cantwell shouted through the door, threatened to kill her and smashed a hole in the wall. She jumped about 10ft from the bathroom window, broke two vertebrae in her spine and injured her heel.
The outcome
Cantwell denied inflicting grievous bodily harm, affray and committing an offence with intent to commit a sexual offence. After a four-week trial at Liverpool Crown Court in December 2013 he was convicted. A hospital order was ruled out and in April 2014 he was jailed for nine years.
His barrister told the court the home’s duty of care “had lapsed completely”. Judge Conrad said he was concerned Cantwell had been allowed to drink in the home, despite having attacked a care worker at another home while under the influence.
What went wrong
One worker, one service user, one small room that could be locked from the inside. The medication room was a confinement risk that nobody had recorded.
Two warnings were on file. Cantwell had attacked a care worker at another home before, and he had been drinking in this one, which the judge treated as a failure in itself.
The control that should have answered was the call to the manager. It rang out. A number with no named responder and no time limit does that at the moment it matters.
Nobody had planned the window. A first-floor bathroom has one, and a worker with no other exit will use it. A 10ft drop is not an evacuation route.
What it teaches
A medication round is the most routine task of a night shift, and routine is where assessment stops. A room with one door, a lock and a drugs cabinet is not neutral space. Once that door closes behind two people, the worker has lost the only thing that made the interaction survivable.
The fixes are unglamorous: two staff on the round, or the door held open and stood in; no one-to-one in a lockable room, whatever the reason for going in; a check-in that names who acts when the phone is not answered, and how quickly; and the medication room written down as a confinement risk.
Questions for the room
- The worker went upstairs alone because a service user had a headache. What is your rule for a one-to-one in a lockable room?
- When a call to a manager rings out at 21:00, what is supposed to happen next, and who is supposed to do it?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. One contemporaneous report was read in full, the Liverpool Echo of 2 April 2014. The worker could not be named for legal reasons and is not named here. No source publishes the home’s risk assessment, its staffing policy or its check-in procedure, so this page describes what happened, not what the employer had written down. A training deck in the vault says she jumped 20ft; the newspaper says 10ft and the record follows it.
Our lone working training covers the risk assessment for staff who work alone at night.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.