Ashworth Hospital

Ashworth Hospital is a high security psychiatric hospital at Maghull in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, England. Ashworth is one of only three high-security specialist psychiatric hospitals in England and Wales, along with Rampton and Broadmoor, that exist to work with people who require treatment due to their "dangerous, violent or criminal propensities". Ashworth was formed from the merger of the old Moss Side Hospital (originally a learning-disability unit once used for the treatment of "shell shock" in World War I) and the vastly more modern and considerably more appropriate Park Lane Hospital, opened as a Broadmoor overspill unit in the early 1970s. The hospital has had a mixed history and has been the subject of...