A responsible clinician is an approved clinician (a mental health professional, usually a consultant psychiatrist, approved by, or on behalf of, the Secretary of State for the purposes of the Mental Health Act, with statutory roles and responsibilities). The responsible clinician has the overall responsibility for a patient’s case under the 1983 Act. Certain decisions, such as renewing a patient’s detention or placing a patient on supervised community treatment, can only be taken by the responsible clinician.
	Section 10 of the Act makes two amendments to section 34 subsection (1) (Interpretation of Part 2) of the 1983 Act which contains definitions of certain terms used within the 1983 Act. The amendments are firstly (a), which adds a new term "relevant hospital", to mean either the hospital that a patient is liable to be detained in or, for a patient on a CTO, the hospital which is responsible for them, and secondly (b), which extends the definition of "responsible clinician" to specify that the responsible clinician has overall responsibility for a patient’s care as now, but with the added provision that this is because the managers of the "relevant hospital" have nominated the responsible clinician.
	Subsections (3) to (6) then make consequential amendments throughout the 1983 Act to apply this extended definition of the responsible clinician.
	The amendment to the definition of "responsible clinician" to refer to a nomination by the hospital managers seeks simply to clarify the current position in relation to how a responsible clinician is assigned overall responsibility for a patient’s care and makes no practical change to the role of a responsible clinician or how they are appointed. This is intended to clarify the distinction between the definition and role of the responsible clinician and the new definition of "community clinician" who will have an increased role in relation to patients on community treatment orders (CTOs). The responsible clinician would retain overall responsibility for the patient’s case. Further detail on the role of the community clinician can be found at Section 22 (Consultation of the community clinician).
The responsible clinician Section 10: Nomination of the responsible clinician