sandr059

This post is an update of a post I did nearly a year ago focusing on the paid employment of people with learning disabilities, mainly using social care statistics for 2015/16 that have been recently released . This relatively short post focuses on paid employment. Although the way these statistics are collected changed in 2014/15, comparisons over time are relatively straightforward. And it’s important to realise that these statistics are only for ‘working age’ (age 18-64 years) adults with learning disabilities who up to 2013/14 were ‘known’ to councils, and from 2014/15 onwards were getting ‘long term support’ from councils ( discussed here ). So, the first graph we have below is the percentage of working age adults with learning disabilities in any form of paid employment (no matter how part-time). The percentage is shockingly low, dropping consistently from 2011/12 to 2015/16, and standing at 5.8% in 2015/16. There is also a steady gap in paid employment between men and women with ...

I put this post together a while ago but I'm worrying now that it's too despairing and nihilistic, as it maybe implies that meaningful change is impossible. I don't think I think this, but that would be a blogpost in itself, which I will spare you. Anyway, here it is... This post is simply a selection of quotes from official government inquiries, policy statements and reviews over the past 40 years or so. See if you can spot any themes… (quote from Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude) “As happened so often in the field of lunacy reform the early efforts of enlightened philanthropists in providing ‘schools’ gave way to the building of remote prison-like establishments to which the outcasts of the Victorian moral code could be consigned.” (HM Government, 1979) “Gradually throughout the 1920s and 30s the emphasis shifted from containment to active care and by the outbreak of the second world war such features as open wards, community care, mental health social workers, sp...

In my previous blogpost, I described some aspects of hospital services for people with learning disabilities 40 years ago, and wondered about continuities and differences from then to what’s happening in ‘specialist’ inpatient units for people with learning disabilities. Fortuitously, in the same year of 1976 a Committee of Enquiry (Department of Health and Social Security, 1979a) commissioned a large-scale survey of 967 nursing staff working in hospitals for people with learning disabilities (Department of Health and Social Security, 1979b). In this blogpost I want to do something similar to the previous post but focusing on staff – what do the results from this survey tell us about how things were 40 years ago, and what would a similar survey of staff in inpatient services today reveal? From the previous blogpost, it’s important to remind ourselves that in 1976 there were nearly 50,000 people with learning disabilities living in mainly big hospitals (compared to the approximately 3,0...

As I’m being increasingly swaddled in the bri-nylon sheets of middle age (comfortable, slightly uncomfortable, OUCH STATIC ELECTRIC SHOCK, and repeat) my sense of historical time is wobbling around more and more alarmingly. Last week can feel like distant history, while 40 years ago can become a blink of a(n?) historical eye [“Now children, imagine a time when people didn’t have computers or mobiles, duvets hadn’t made it to the UK, push-button phones were a bolt from the future, and you had to go to a shop to buy music played by putting a needle on to a big black plastic plate”] It was in this mood that I went to our spankingly refurbished University library (“Look! A tree! Indoors!”), which still finds room on its gleaming shelves for all sorts of old books, reports and statistical publications. I was looking for things that might give me some way to think about what’s happened to inpatient services for people with learning disabilities in England. Are the supposedly specialist inpat...

This map (produced by the Department of Adult Social Care in Calderdale Council) maps the postcodes of all the services for people with learning disabilities registered with the CQC as specialist hospitals as of August 2016. Many, many thanks to Calderdale for this, and for #7daysofaction for prompting it.

For the first week of the #7daysofaction campaign, in April this year, I wrote a series of short blogposts going through some of the statistics about people with learning disabilities in inpatient services in England. For this week’s #7daysofaction you’ll be relieved to know that I’m not going to churn out as many posts (the national position hasn’t changed hugely since April). Instead I want to take a bit of a longer view about where we are – in this post compared to just before the Winterbourne View Panorama programme, and then in other posts looking back 40 years or even longer. Image from Michael Bernard Loggins (2007). Imagionality: Michael’s lovable fun of dictionaries . Manic D Press: San Francisco. In this post I’m trying to get a handle on how specialist inpatient services for people with learning disabilities have changed (or not) in the time since the Panorama programme on Winterbourne View went out. Obviously since then there has been a major government and NHS England focu...