Kent’s mental health services have been rated ‘fair’ in a national report.

Health watchdog the Healthcare Commission assessed the UK’s 69 NHS trusts that provide acute mental health, giving each a score of ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘fair’ or ‘weak’ based on their standard of care, safety, involvement of patients and carers, and how well patients moved through the health system.

The Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust was among 30 trusts rated ‘fair’. Just eight received the top score of ‘excellent’, although no trust was scored as ‘excellent’ across all four of the key criteria.

Twenty were rated ‘good’ and 11 were deemed ‘weak’.

The Kent and Medway Trust was praised for its efforts to keep service users and carers involved in care and strategic planning, evaluation and development, but improvements are needed in following up patients within seven days of discharge, and undertaking physical health checks on admission.

A spokesman for the trust said: “Progress on many of the weaker areas has already been made and the agreed action plan arising from this review will only further serve to support this work.

“We are committed to closely examining every part of the review to ensure all of our services make improvements in all areas.”

The report found considerable problems with violence on wards across the UK, with 45 per cent of nurses and 15 per cent of patient suffering attacks in the last year.

There were also issues with overcrowding.

Anna Walker, the Commission’s Chief Executive, said: "It is clear that it is possible to provide patients with excellent acute hospital care and that some organisations are doing exactly that.

“But our report also shows that there are issues of significant concern and this is particularly true for some organisations.

“I think that society is sometimes reluctant to talk about mental health care concerns, but I’m afraid the problems are not going to just go away.

“We need to have the same high expectations for these services as we do for other parts of the NHS.”

The Government said £130million has already been invested in addressing mental health care problems over the past two years.