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This is just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about trends in residential and nursing care for adults with learning disabilities, prompted by Steve Broach's typically perspicacious question about variations in residential and nursing care across different local authorities in England. So, here are a few bits and pieces from another look at the NHS Digital data . First, the two big graphs below (they wouldn't fit into one, I discovered) are simply the numbers of adults with learning disabilities aged 18-64 and 65+ in residential and nursing care homes during 2015/16, by individual local authority. It's important to realise that these are numbers of people (rounded to the nearest 5), not rates of people in residential or nursing care per 100,000 population. Obviously, local authorities with bigger populations might be expected to report larger numbers of people in all types of service. [I've tried making the graphs extra large in Blogger in the home that people c...

The riddle of the model* There have been a number of straws in the wind (and sometimes more than just straws) that commissioners of health and social care, aided and abetted by ‘care’ service providers, are looking for ways to move more people with learning disabilities (and disabled people generally) into residential and nursing care . This blogpost simply aims to provide some statistics on the number of adults with learning disabilities in England in residential and nursing care, and how much local authorities are spending on these types of service. I think my main conclusion is that, although residential and nursing care may be coming back, they’ve never really gone away. In 2015/16 , local authorities were funding 30,240 adults with learning disabilities in residential care services, and a further 1,815 adults with learning disabilities in nursing homes (all data in this blogpost are from NHS Digital). The graph below shows that the overall trend over time is broadly downwards (th...

I’ve wittered on in too many previous blogposts about what the statistics are telling us about the number of people with learning disabilities and/or autism in inpatient services in England, and how NHS England claims of reductions look to me somewhat premature. So, with Transforming Care Plans springing into action, is the picture finally looking brighter? (as opposed to the future being orange, which as we now know does not mean brighter except in a malfunctioning TV kind of way) Well, in this blogpost I’m going to share statistics that lead me to think the picture is much worse than I thought. New analyses from the good people at NHS Digital ( together with some old analyses from them that I shamefully missed , thank you to Tim Williams at Reading University for drawing my attention to the relevant table) strongly indicate that there are many more people with learning disabilities and/or autism using inpatient services than NHS England typically mention in their reports of progress...