Out for the count
At the start of the Winterbourne View/Transforming Care programme to get (some) people with learning disabilities out of specialist inpatient services, it became very clear that information about the number of people in inpatient services, and what was happening to them, was pretty much absent. The National Audit Office (see https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Care-services-for-people-with-learning-disabilities-and-challenging-behaviour.pdf ) and the Public Accounts Committee gave NHS England a good going over about this in 2015. Although the determined invisibility of people with learning disabilities in inpatient services had been an issue for some years, the Health and Social Care Act (2012) made a bad situation worse in terms of trying to collect comprehensive information. At the end of September 2015, according to data collected from (most) commissioners (HSCIC Assuring Transformation, see http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB19833 ), people with learning disabilitie...