Background Mental health legislation in England & Wales requires assessment by a second opinion appointed doctor (SOAD) to safeguard the rights of patients detained in a hospital under this law if they are either refusing certain treatments or are deemed incapable of consenting to them. Aims Our aim was to evaluate timeliness of SOAD assessments. Method Data were collected from the Mental Health Act administrator on all SOAD requests in 1 year for all in‐patients in two English medium security hospital units. Results One hundred and six patients required a SOAD assessment during the 1‐year period examined, of a combined resident total of 295, as did a further 14 patients who had been discharged from hospital and were subject to a community treatment order. About half of the inpatients were seen by a SOAD within 30 days and a further quarter within 60 days, but the remaining quarter waited up to 150 days or more. Discussion and implications These results suggest that in these trusts, unlikely to be atypical, neither patients nor clinicians are being adequately protected by legal safeguards on decisions to treat with medication (or electroconvulsive therapy) in the event of impaired competence for decisions about mental health treatments. There should be clear standards for the appropriate length of time from referral to assessment by an independent doctor (SOAD). Compliance with standards should be transparent, so anonymised data on the matter should be routinely collected and stored by health trust Mental Health Act offices. Data should be monitored at agreed intervals by an independent body. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.