On a number of occasions psychiatric offenders held up as “patient experts” by trusts have either killed after being discharged from hospital or have advised on patient care despite having killed.

Their appointment is part of NHS England’s “recovery approach”, whereby previously violent psychiatric offenders can be considered “experts by experience” and can be engaged to advise trusts on patient care as “equal partners” with doctors.

NHS trusts enlist experts by experience to advise on improving mental health services, to recruit and train staff and to take part in research projects.

However, doctors and campaigners have raised concerns that some offenders with a history of mental illness who have been employed as experts are being discharged too quickly, posing a potential risk to the public and denying justice to their victims.

One former NHS psychiatrist warned that some patients taking part in such schemes “could be seen as [making] progress”, helping them to be fast-tracked out of detention facilities before it may be safe to do so.

The former head of an NHS mental health trust described the findings of the Telegraph’s investigation as “very worrying”.

“Hearing the user experience is one thing. But getting someone who has killed someone to advise you on how to care for people who are seriously ill is another,” he said.

In one example, the Royal College of Psychiatry enlisted Martin Saberi – a repeat offender who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2008 and was released on licence in 2016 after serving 16 years of a life sentence for armed robbery – to deliver a workshop on substance misuse to doctors at its annual forum in July 2018.

Patients who take part in the Royal College scheme can earn up to £140 a day and must be a “role model” for the organisation’s values and behaviours, according to a 2024 candidate information pack.

In January 2019, Saberi, who still has a LinkedIn account linked to his name that describes him a “service user expert at Royal College of Psychiatrists”, murdered Amy Griffiths, a transgender woman [sic] Saberi met on a dating site.

The killer, whose criminal convictions date back to 1989, bludgeoned Griffiths with a baseball bat before strangling [him] and slitting [his] throat. In 2021, he was given a life sentence for murder and for stabbing a woman in the neck several days before.

An NHS England report into the killing states that the day before the attack, Saberi, whose name is anonymised, “engaged in his work as a lived experience consultant and no concerns were noted”.

It also found that the work “may have led to some considerable pressure for [him] to maintain a coping façade and mask difficulties that he was experiencing”. …

The concept of experts by experience became embedded in NHS practice in the early 2010s as part of a broader push towards so-called “co-production”, which states that people with “lived experience” are “often best placed to advise” on the care they require. …

A Nottingham policy document seen by the Telegraph commits to treating “experts by experience as equal partners” to doctors.

The trust hosted workshops from 2019 onwards in which patients made recommendations including asking to be let out to “take positive risks and learn from our mistakes”. …

The Royal College came under fire in 2020 following reports that it had failed to carry out DBS checks on 374 representatives, including patients.

According to the Health Service journal, some of those people were “current or former mental health patients it pays to form policy and visit providers”.