The responsible clinician can add, vary or suspend conditions to a person’s community treatment order (CTO) to require that the person should fulfil particular criteria. This may include, for example, living in a certain place, attending appointments with mental health professionals, or not taking drugs and drinking alcohol. Recall to hospital should not solely be based on whether a person follows these conditions; rather it should be dependent on whether, in the opinion of the responsible clinician, the patient requires medical treatment in hospital for his mental disorder and there would be a risk of serious harm to the health or safety of the patient or to other persons if the patient were not recalled to hospital for that purpose. However, people on a CTO are often unaware of this and the conditions given to a CTO can therefore be seen as coercive or overly restrictive as not following them can be wrongly understood to be grounds for recall to hospital.
	Section 23 makes two amendments in relation to the conditions that a person subject to a CTO may be required to follow.
	Subsection (1) deletes the words "or appropriate" from the phrase "necessary or appropriate" in section 17B(2) of the 1983 Act, to provide that conditions can only be imposed when they are necessary to serve one or more of the purposes specified.
	Subsection (2) inserts section 72(3B), which provides a new power for the Tribunal to recommend that the responsible clinician reconsiders whether a particular CTO condition is necessary, in cases where the Tribunal has decided not to discharge a patient from a CTO under section 72(1) of the 1983 Act.
Community treatment orders Section 23: Conditions of community treatment orders