State Hospital for Scotland and Northern Ireland

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The State Hospital for Scotland and Northern Ireland (officially The State Hospital; also called Carstairs Hospital) is a psychiatric hospital providing care and treatment in conditions of high security for around 240 patients from Scotland and Northern Ireland who need to be detained in hospital under conditions of special security that can only be provided by the State Hospital. The hopital is located at 55°41′44″N, 3°39′14″W near the village of Carstairs, in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.

The hospital is run by the State Hospitals Board for Scotland which is a public body accountable to the First Minister of Scotland through the Scottish Government Health and Wellbeing Directorates. They are a Special Health Board, part of the NHS Scotland and the only hospital of its kind within Scotland.

The Board and the Hospital has over 600 staff.

Their aim is "to help patients recover sufficiently from their illness to enable them to be transferred to services closer to their homes. Where this is not possible, we strive to help them to cope with their disabilities, and to live their lives as fully as possible."1

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After the escape of Robert Mone and Thomas McCulloch on St Andrew's Day in 1976 during which they murdered a patient, a nurse and a policeman, the hospital set up an alarm system. The system is activated if any patient escapes to alert people in the vicinity, including those in the surrounding town of Lanark, and local villages such as Ravenstruther. This alarm system is based on World War II air-raid sirens, and a two-tone alarm sounds across the whole area in the event of an escape. The system is tested on the third Thursday of every month at 1300hrs for two minutes, after which a single tone 'all-clear' is sounded for a further two minutes.