‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light’. At a suitably pre-Christmas period, a Memorandum setting out the future shape of our mental health services, as well as the way they are to be achieved, descended on a waiting psychiatric world. Santa Claus, though, with his capital and revenue allocations, is unlikely to call at all those hospital chimneys and water-towers which Enoch Powell threatened with destruction eleven years ago and which still stand as reproachfully as ever.

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’.

In late September 1969 a party of R.M.P.A. members and their guests met at Victoria Coach Station to begin a Study Tour in France. We travelled by bus to Ashford Airport, thence by ‘plane to France, and again by bus to our first stop, Chartres. Here we were given time for a brief glimpse of the Cathedral and its vitraux, and then on to Tours.

Our Study of Denmark commenced on Wednesday, 28 April 1971, when the party travelled via Harwich and Esbjerg to Aarhus, Denmark's second largest town. Here we encountered an inflationary problem worse even than our own; and, with traffic moving at an even more frighteningly fast rate than ours, we realized that Denmark had its quota of pushful and aggressive drivers. Overall, however, we were impressed with the natural courtesy of the Danish people, their placid stability and their tolerance. And so to the purpose of our visit.