I READ with interest Stephen Naysmith's article on the decision by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) to remove polythene bin bags from its mental health wards and facilities ("Plastic bags ban in mental health wards after suicides", The Herald, April 17).

Might it not be better to employ more frontline nursing staff to try to prevent incidences of self-harm in psychiatric hospitals? This would seem the most practical and commonsense solution to an age-old problem.

There is, however, a side issue here that has been overlooked, in that over the past five years there has been a proliferation in the creation of psychiatric self-harm risk assessments that have to be completed by very busy frontline medical and nursing staff.

Completing one of these risk assessments can easily take up an hour or more of a staff nurse's time, time that may paradoxically be more useful spent in observing the actual patients in order to prevent incidences of self-harm.

It would be very interesting to ascertain the figures for the numbers of these self-harm risk assessments completed by health boards on a year-by-year basis for the past five years.

If these risk assessments have increased exponentially in their use (with the concomitant drain on nursing/medical staff time) then surely there must be a direct correlation to the numbers of incidences of self-harm that have occurred.

Have these incidences decreased markedly in the last five years? If they have not, then what is the point of these mountains of risk assessments? Would it be disingen­uous to suggest that the reason these risk assessments are completed may have more to do with the "box ticking" target-related culture in our NHS and the need to protect those at the top from shouldering any responsibility or accountability whenever another suicide happens.

My own feelings are that the removal of black bin bags from psychiatric hospitals will do little to prevent these tragedies. The freeing up of frontline staff from such pointless nonsense may do more to save patient's lives.

Rab Wilson,

1 Nursery View,

New Cumnock.