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To accompany #7daysofaction (see here for more details and stories of people’s horrendous experiences at the hands of inpatient services https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/ ), this week I’m writing a series of short blogposts looking at the statistics we have about inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England. This post looks at who is being ‘admitted’ to inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England, and who is either being discharged (lovely word, not) or ‘transferred’ to another hospital of some kind. This information has only started to be collected in the Assuring Transformation dataset (see here for the latest information http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB20499 ). This is collected and collated monthly by the Health and Social Care Information Centre from reports by health service commissioners of inpatient services in England (Clinical Commissioning Groups and NHS England specialist commissioners), and has now been collected cons...

To accompany #7daysofaction (see here for more details and heartbreaking stories https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/ ), this week I’m writing a series of short blogposts looking at the statistics we have about inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England. This post looks at what is included in both the annual Learning Disability Census and the monthly Assuring Transformation dataset about ‘care plans’. For me, this information is really about the assumptions that inpatient services are making about why people are there and what their prospects are for leaving again. So, both datasets record ‘care plans’ under the following categories and sub-categories. First, there are people who ‘Need inpatient care according to the care plan’, including: People who are not dischargeable at the time of the care plan People who need indefinite inpatient care for behavioural needs People who need indefinite inpatient care for physical needs People who have an active treatment pl...

To accompany #7daysofaction (see here for more details and heartbreaking stories https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/ ), this week I’m writing a series of short blogposts looking at the statistics we have about inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England. One thing that people and families talk about is how hard it is if someone is moved to an inpatient service a long way from home and family. This post takes a look at information from the Learning Disability Census from 2013 to 2015 (in earlier Count Me In censuses postcodes weren’t stored in a way that allowed this analysis to be done) (see here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=19718&q=learning+disability+census+2013&sort=Most+recent&size=100&page=1#top and here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=20487&q=learning+disability+census+2013&sort=Most+recent&size=100&page=1#top ) about how far the inpatient units that people were living in were from th...

To accompany #7daysofaction, this week I’m writing a series of short blogposts looking at the statistics we have about inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England. The stories in #7daysofaction (see here https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/ ) show us the real cost in the blighted lives (and sometimes deaths) of people with learning disabilities and the impact on their families. There is also a financial cost (or more strictly speaking a financial charge, for these two things are not the same) for these inpatient services, paid for by the state. This blogpost looks at the charges made for these inpatient services, as collected by the Health and Social Care Information Centre in the Learning Disability Census from 2013 to 2015 (see http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB19428 ). The graph below shows the amount charged, per week , for a place in an inpatient service in England. First, there is a huge range of charges per week – the extent to which this range maps on...

To accompany #7daysofaction (see this superb post from @KaraChrome that pulls together the strands of the 7 stories shared during the week https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/just-want-to-go-home/ ), this week I’ve been writing a series of short blogposts looking at some of the statistics we have about inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England. This is the last post in this series. It has a few more graphs than usual, to try and build a picture from national statistics of a few aspects of what happens to people once they are in an inpatient service. National statistics are the last place to really understand what people experience (the stories in #7daysofaction do that), but there are a few indicators of ‘adverse experiences’ and more recently medication prescription in the Learning Disability Census and, before that, the Count Me In Census (see here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=19718&q=learning+disability+census+20...

This third statistical blogpost to accompany #7daysofaction is a bit different to the first two – rather than using inpatient census information to look at trends over time from 2006 to 2015, this post uses Assuring Transformation information (see here for the latest information http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB20499 ). This is collected and collated monthly by the Health and Social Care Information Centre from reports by health service commissioners of inpatient services in England (Clinical Commissioning Groups and NHS England specialist commissioners), and has now been collected consistently for just over a year. To justify their existence, much is made of the highly ‘specialist’ nature of inpatient services, where multiple professionals come together to understand and work with ‘complex’ individuals. In this post I want to look at a really straightforward indicator of professional practice within inpatient services, reviews. Every month, the Assuring Transformation dataset repo...

This is the second short blogpost looking at recent trends in what’s happening with learning disability inpatient services in England to accompany the #7daysofaction campaign. This one looks at levels of ward security for people with learning disabilities in inpatient services in England from 2007 to 2015, using inpatient census information (see here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=19718&q=learning+disability+census+2013&sort=Most+recent&size=100&page=1#top , here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=20487&q=learning+disability+census+2013&sort=Most+recent&size=100&page=1#top and here https://www.improvinghealthandlives.org.uk/publications/1161/A&T_and_other_specialist_inpatient_care_for_people_with_LD_in_the_Count-Me-In_census ). There is currently a lot of debate about different types of specialist inpatient service (particularly attempts to define Assessment and Treatment Units as fundamentally different to secure,...

To accompany the #7daysofaction campaign, I’m going to try and write some very short blogposts looking at recent trends in what’s happening with learning disability inpatient services in England. This one looks at trends over a 10-year time period in the overall number of people in learning disability inpatient services, and the balance of NHS vs independent sector services over this time. To do this, I’m using information from the Health and Social Care Information Centre Learning Disability Census, which ran annually from 2013 to 2015 and asked providers of specialist learning disability inpatient services in England lots of questions about their services and who was in them on the Census date (30 th September). The latest reports for the 2015 Census have lots of useful information on trends from 2013 to 2015 (see here http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=19718&q=learning+disability+census+2013&sort=Most+recent&size=100&page=1#top and http://www.hscic.go...

To accompany the #7daysofaction campaign to help spring people with learning disabilities from specialist inpatient services, I was thinking of doing some short blogposts looking at some of the official statistics around inpatient services for people with learning disabilities. [image from omgif] However, I ended up writing this instead - prompted by Eden’s story (see here https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/mum-i-cant-get-the-words-out/ ) and some of the media coverage around #7daysofaction. This is the narrative coming from a range of professional groups that: 1) People with learning disabilities are in inpatient services because they are ‘complex’ (often a code word for ‘dangerous’); 2) For many/most people with learning disabilities in inpatient services, an inpatient service is the only rational response (even if people end up in them for too long); 3) Only professionals (principally psychiatry but also clinical psychology and others) have the ‘scientific’ expertise req...

[Warning: this post contains quotes from a 1914 textbook using terms which are today highly offensive] Earlier this week, I took a rare trip to our university library (a sad indictment of current academic life in itself), and found there a copy of “Mental Deficiency (Amentia)”, the 1914 second edition of a clinical textbook by Alfred Tredgold, one of the principal architects of eugenics for people with learning disabilities in the UK. This textbook was immensely influential, and ran through several editions over a number of years. In this post I don’t want to offer any general observations on this book, as historians and social theorists have done a much better job of this than I could. As I was going through some of it (I couldn’t face reading it cover to cover as I was feeling distinctly nauseous), I noticed a relatively short section on mortality, including some data. Although the information is limited, it gives a point of comparison between then (around 1910) and recent informatio...