On 27th July 2026, Stop Oxevision sent a letter of complaint to Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust (CNTW) regarding the Trust’s ongoing use of LIO/Oxevision. We called on the Trust to suspend its use of Oxevision within all patient bedrooms, seclusion rooms and s136 suites with immediate effect.
We shared significant concerns about the safety, legal, safeguarding and information governance concerns associated with the technology.
CNTW use Oxevision on up to 49 wards and are the second most prolific users of the technology with an annual contract fee well in excess of a million pounds. After piloting Oxevision on just three wards in 2021, the Trust prepared a business case to install Oxevision to all the remaining 40 wards across the Trust. Oxevision had already been installed on an additional 6 CAMHS wards before the pilot and evaluation had even been completed.
The business case lacked independent scrutiny of the evidence base or consideration of safety and legal issues. It focused heavily on cost savings as associated with the use of the video camera for conducting remote observations. CNTW recognise the lack of patient involvement in these decisions. Subsequent evaluations revealed poor experiences and concerns highlighted by patients, whilst the Trust’s meeting minutes also detail that the technology was rolled out despite significant concerns raised by staff. This contributed to delays in rolling out the technology meaning that by 2024, CNTW were being charged £265,000 annually for Oxevision software ‘licences’ on wards where Oxevision was neither installed nor in use.
CNTW have recently made changes to their Oxevision consent processes, however until October 2024, at CNTW, there was no option to turn the camera off locally, meaning that not only was Oxevision used in a blanket way for all patients, but that when they objected, there was no clear process for the camera to be deactivated. Instead, staff would have to contact Oxhealth who would remotely deactivate and reactivate the camera – an arrangement that raises further concerns regarding an external company having remote operational access to video cameras in patients’ bedrooms.
In the case of the Trust’s CAMHS wards, the Trust appears to have offered false reassurance of telling patients to place a card on their door when they got changed or needed “private time”, despite the video cameras still recording and sharing video with an external, unregulated company. Furthermore, our complaint letter raised specific safeguarding concerns following FOI disclosure that revealed that Oxehealth engineer staff had independently identified, accessed, viewed and retained clear video of a child on a CAMHS ward without the individual or their family’s knowledge or consent.
Our letter also highlights that CNTW have failed to follow appropriate processes under GDPR by failing to raise the intended high risk data processing to the ICO. As set out in our complaint, their meeting minutes reveal a host of further data breaches including patients being mistakenly given the Oxevision tablets, which had the password written on it.
As of 2025, an internal audit identified continued and pressing issues with there being a lack of information about Oxevision available to patients, patients not fully being aware of the technology, staff not being fully trained, and a ward where the alerts had never been audible.
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