A YOUNG woman was found hanged in a bathroom at a Winchester mental health unit.

Rachel Knowles, 21, from Chandler's Ford, was found dead at the Melbury Lodge adult mental health acute unit, in Romsey Road, on Monday afternoon.

A spokesman for the Hampshire Partnership NHS Trust, which runs the unit on the same site as the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, said: "We can confirm a woman took her own life and was found hanged in a bathroom at Melbury Lodge."

Police confirmed they were called to the scene at 4.50pm and are not treating the death as suspicious. The Coroners' Office said an inquest is due to be opened in Chandler's Ford this week.

Last September Melbury Lodge was criticised by Grahame Short, Coroner for Central Hampshire, after 18-year-old Ainslie Jones, a Peter Symonds' College student boarding in Winchester, was found hanged in a locked bathroom.

She died in June and had tried the same act the day before her death with a scarf, but had been stopped by nursing staff.

The inquest heard that Ainslie told the nurses she had just frightened herself and would not do it again, and was given the scarf back.

Mr Short said at the time: "I do believe there was a failure to identify and rectify the risk of patients locking themselves in the bathroom Ainslie used, which couldn't be easily observed or opened quickly in the case of an emergency."

The spokesman for the Hampshire Partnership NHS Trust said it had been wrongly criticised by the Coroner after Ainslie's death, and it had made changes to bathroom locks since then.

He added there were different circumstances in the case of this latest death, but said he could not go into further detail.