The Department of Health's 1971 Circular (HM (71) 97) and the White Paper, Better Services for the Mentally Ill (1975), had recommended the guideline of 0.5 acute beds per 1,000 population as an average for District General Hospital units. Patients with stays of more than one year, the elderly severely mentally infirm (ESMI), children, adolescents, and certain specialized units were not included. Unfortunately, planners have tended to stick to this figure, despite the fact that the recommendation was only meant as a general guideline based on known bed usage up to 1974, and some more recent downward trends in newer smaller community-based units. The suggestion that bed requirements should be modified according to local circumstances had largely been ignored, and this is not surprising as there is little information which can help planners determine the factors or their weighting which any local authority should take into account to adapt the norm for ‘local circumstances'. This led to the setting up of a working party of the College's Social and Community Psychiatry Section to make recommendations on bed norms for acute psychiatric units.

In November 1982, a conference on the provision of comprehensive, district based, psychiatric services was organized by the Community Psychiatry Research Unit of St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College. At this conference, Lord Trefgarne, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the DHSS, reaffirmed the Department's policy of creating local district psychiatric services and closing those mental illness hospitals which are not well placed to provide a local service.

Every member of the College is entitled to these two monthlies, which go all over the world, since about a quarter of the membership is overseas. While the Bulletin is predominantly about College work and membership activities, and goes only to the membership, the Journal is an international medical-scientific journal with a circulation also among non-member subscribers worldwide, particularly among university libraries, medical schools and governmental health agencies. Because of this extensive sale, and because the Journal is published by the College instead of by a commercial publisher such as Blackwell or Macmillan (as are many journals), the money coming in is enough to finance the whole publishing operation. This is particularly so since the editors and assessors give their time and expertise entirely without fees, in some cases amounting to many hours a week of honorary labour, although all the editors (for instance) are also in clinical practice. The financial effect is that not one penny of a member's subscription goes to the production and mailing of these two journals to members, indeed, some of the Journal's ‘profit’ can be applied to reducing the cost of other College publications, which are often sold at a loss.

Over the past few years a number of policy statements concerning the needs of people with mental handicap have been published.