Posts

New statistics on restraint, seclusion and segregation - what do they tell us?

The ‘restrictive interventions’ (or more bluntly restraint, seclusion and segregation) being used by inpatient services on people with learning disabilities or autistic people has been gaining some public and political attention, thanks to the doughty work of many campaigners and journalists. The Secretary of State for Health (and Care – remember what that is?) has commissioned the Care Quality Commission to “ review the use of restraint, prolonged seclusion and segregation for people with mental health, a learning disability and/or autism ”. Before today (17 January 2019) there have been no publicly available statistics on what inpatient units are doing to people with learning disabilities or autistic people in inpatient units in terms of ‘restrictive interventions’ since information collected from the last Learning Disability Inpatient Census in September 2015 ( see this blogpost for details) . Recently, both radio (File On 4) and TV (Sky News) gained and made public data from NHS Di...
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Where are we at with social care for adults with learning disabilities?

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This year I’ve going to try and write slightly more blogposts than last year (don’t say you weren’t warned), with a focus on information rather than opinion where possible. So, on the day when the NHS Long Term Plan is published, it makes perfect sense to start with a blogpost on… social care. This post will look at trends in the data produced by NHS Digital on social care statistics related to adults with learning disabilities. There will be graphs. Councils with social services responsibilities return information to NHS Digital every year on how many adults are using various forms of social care, and how much councils spend on social care (this doesn’t include other types of state funding relevant to social care, such as housing benefit as part of supported living support). When looking at trends over time it’s important to remember that there were big changes in the way information was collected between 2013/14 and 2014/15, the one with the biggest impact being that up to 2013/14 mo...
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Restraints, assaults and self-harm in inpatient units

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The BBC Panorama exposure of how people with learning disabilities were abused by staff was over 7 years ago now, and despite the ongoing ministrations of Transforming Care the litany of abusive practices in ‘specialist’ learning disability inpatient units and residential care homes continues to the present day, and no doubt into the future. Given what has happened at Winterbourne View and beyond, a central concern of the Transforming Care programme should be to ‘transform’ what actually happens to people in inpatient services. How many people, how often, experience different types of ‘restrictive intervention’ – physical restraint (including prone restraint where people are pinned to the floor), seclusion (solitary confinement), mechanical restraint (being physically contained so you can’t move), or being subjected to heavy duty medication? And that’s before you take into account self-harm or being physically assaulted by other people in the same place as you. Government initiatives s...
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Valuing People Then - The Government Response to the LEDER report

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Today (12 th September 2018) the government response to the Learning from Deaths Review (LeDeR) report was published (badged as coming from the Department for Health and Social Care and NHS England). The LeDeR project is being run by Bristol University (the same group who ran the Confidential Inquiry into the Premature Deaths of People with Learning Disabilities), and is working to put into place a national system for reviewing the deaths of people with learning disabilities across England. A report of progress so far on the LeDeR project was finally published in May 2018 (despite the date on the report being December 2017). At the time I wrote two blogposts about what the report said and the circumstances of its publication so I don’t want to go over this ground again here: suffice it to say for this blog that the report made 9 recommendations about what needed to happen to improve how people’s deaths were reviewed and to make a start on stopping the shocking scale of needless de...
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