When Christopher Chambers was four, his mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She had schizophrenia. Now 59, and with four children of his own, he has never forgotten the horror of going to see her. It was the 1940s and the wards were vast. She was given electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), and the treatment was primitive. "I had an innate feeling that this wasn't right," he says.
His mother's bouts in hospital disrupted family life. Chambers, the youngest of four, was sent to live with grandparents and an aunt. He would peer through the windows at the patients at one of the big psychiatric hospitals in Epsom, Surrey: "It looked like a concentration camp."
Chambers' objections to these institutions became his beacon. For more than 30 years, he has worked to rehabilitate and resettle psychiatric patients in the community. In honouring him as "outstanding achiever in social care", the Health and Social Care Awards judging panel praised his "drive to put patients first in mental health at a time when it wasn't fashionable".
Chambers had planned to be an engineer, but while studying civil engineering in London, he worked as a volunteer in university "settlements" in areas of poverty. The experience spurred him on to work with homeless people when he began a PhD in Edinburgh in the late 1960s.
Within a year, he had abandoned engineering and taken a job in what was then called a school for maladjusted children. "It took me two years to emotionally distance myself from my own family problems and think how I might do things for others," Chambers says.
He began working in a hostel for young men coming out of prison and Borstal. "I felt this was what I wanted to do," he remembers. "I'm still in touch with clients from that time. One still rings me up. He has a family now and his life has been very successful."
Chambers qualified as a social worker in 1971 at 27, and began working in Yeovil, Somerset. Two years later, he was appointed senior practitioner in mental health. At that time, there were no acute admission wards in general hospitals for his clients and psychiatric hospitals were full of long-stay patients. "It was appalling," he says. "I'd taken my own mother into hospital in the back end of beyond. There was no normality about it."
He began talking to patients on long-term wards about what they wanted and needed. "I'd say: 'Are you happy, or would you prefer to be back in the community?' All of them said they'd be happy to be out. Though they had food and bedding, they had no rights, no choice."
In 1974, social services gave him an old police house and £250 to take a handful of his clients out of hospi tal and set them up in the community. It was still early in the closure programme of long-stay hospitals. "I used to get one or two people out at a time, then go back and see who else could come out," he says.
He worked as a one-man team and his home in Somerton became an open door where clients often arrived unannounced. Friends and neighbours donated furniture and bedding. In the following decade, a psychiatric ward in a new district hospital in Yeovil greatly improved the care of patients with acute needs and three more psychiatric social workers joined his team, visiting people in their own homes.
In addition, a crisis intervention centre was established, which prevented many people being admitted to hospital. "We'd see people then, or within 24 hours," Chambers says. "We were intervening early and getting patients out early." The team worked evenings and weekends unpaid. "The department had an emergency duty team to cover those hours, but they were not going to be involved with clients long term. It makes a difference if you're going to pick up the pieces afterwards."
The team witnessed the closure of local long-stay hospitals by the early 1990s, the introduction of self-harm screening in A&E and, in 1999, the formation of the first integrated mental-health care trust. "The vogue currently is to say community care has failed," Chambers says, "but there's good care and bad care. We can support people and, though stretched, we have the resources to do it."
After the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989, Chambers went to Liverpool and neighbouring areas affected by the tragedy to support social workers after the British Association of Social Workers became concerned about the effects on frontline staff. "One had started shoplifting and feeding her cat with rice pudding," he recalls. "They were traumatised by what they'd seen."
His skills catapulted him to Kosovo, where he was seconded by the World Health Organisation to help train GPs in mental health care last year. But, Chambers says, psychiatric help was also needed by the doctors themselves. "They had been displaced, emigrated and had come back. They had lost homes, friends, family and many had been living in camps in Macedonia. It was very therapeutic for them."
Back in Yeovil, where he is manager of the adult community mental health team with the Somerset Partnership Trust, Chambers still has a caseload of 50 clients. "I'm not a management man," he says. "My clients are my bread and butter. They have given my job a reason."
