The victim of a frenzied knife attack by a patient released from Springfield Hospital over a decade ago has spoken out against the hospital’s recent security lapses.

Mark Kemp, 38, nearly died when he was stabbed more than 20 times in the chest in 1993, so was outraged when his attacker, Mark Ricketts, was able to escape from the Springfield in 2004.

This week he criticised the hospital for failing to learn lessons from the past and called for the Shaftesbury Unit, which holds dangerous patients, to be closed down.

“They should move the dangerous patients to a more secure place,” he said.

“Each time I learn of another escape I pray that they don’t attack someone else. Every time I hear about someone else, I relive my own event.

“We have to protect our community life and it’s about time we pulled the plug on this whole situation.”

Ricketts attacked Mr Kemp with a kitchen knife in Tooting Broadway tube station just months after being released from Springfield Hospital.

He only survived because the blade bent during the attack and still suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Ricketts, who had schizophrenia, was convicted of attempted murder and sent to Broadmoor, but in 2004 he visited Springfield Hospital and escaped after staff took him on an unplanned walk outside a secure zone.

At one point, police were searching for him outside the home of Mr Kemp, who was only informed of the escape later by a journalist.

“There’s no system to alert members of the public,” he added. “I believe that victims and victim’s families deserve a warning.”

The decision to inform the public on escaped patients lies with the police, although legislation introduced in 2005 states victims must be notified.

Mr Kemp is still campaigning for this legislation to apply to victims like him, whose attackers were detained before the law was passed.

A spokesman for Springfield Hospital said: “The medium-secure unit at South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust is the Shaftesbury Clinic and it currently exceeds the recommended physical security guidelines for medium-secure units.

“The trust is very concerned to ensure that local people feel safe and know we take care of their interests as well as the interests of patients. We are acutely aware that we urgently need to address the concerns of the local community about the proximity of a medium-secure mental health unit.

“We routinely carry out rigorous internal investigations when any serious incident takes place in any of the trust’s services and make required changes to assure ourselves that our services are effective and safe.

“If a patient in our medium-secure unit absconds or escapes, the trust will automatically notify the police. It is the police’s decision as to whether the public is alerted.

“Finally we must stress that it is much more likely that a person with a mental illness will hurt themselves or be hurt by someone else than be violent or dangerous to others.”

Mr Kemp, a Fulham resident, now volunteers for the air ambulance and runs a website aiming to destigmatise mental illness.