That the overwhelming majority of psychiatric patients have benefited from the ‘open-door’ policy of our mental hospitals is undoubted: whether all psychiatric patients are being managed in the best possible way is less certain. The Oxford Regional Hospital Board, which now has no permanently locked wards in its psychiatric hospitals, has published the report of a working party set up to consider ‘new and co-ordinated patterns of care deemed to be appropriate for those individuals requiring security for the protection of themselves or the public, who may be amenable to medical and nursing treatment in the broadest sense, but who are out of place in a modern psychiatric hospital setting’.