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Today saw the publication of a landmark study by Australian academics Julian Trollor, Preeyaporn Srasuebkul, Han Xu and Sophie Howlett on deaths amongst a cohort of 19,362 people with learning (intellectual) disabilities in New South Wales, Australia. Their findings are in BMJ Open here, and are free to download and read. This article in the Sydney Morning Herald is also a really good summary, and there is an easy read summary here. Their findings are depressingly familiar. The median age of death (the age at which half of all deaths had occurred) for people with learning disabilities was 54 years (55 years for boys/men; 52 years for girls/women). This was 27 years younger than the median age of death of 81 years reported for the rest of the population. Over three-quarters of the deaths of people with learning disabilities (76%) occurred before the age of 65, compared to just 18% of the deaths of other people. Adults with learning disabilities aged 20-44 were four times more likely ...

In the ongoing debate about the Transforming Care programme in England, a distinction is often made between inpatient services described as Assessment and Treatment Units (ATUs) and inpatient services variously described as secure and/or forensic. The argument sometimes follows from this that Transforming Care should be focused on reducing/closing the number of ATU places (largely commissioned by CCGs), because secure/forensic inpatient services (largely commissioned by NHS England specialist commissioning teams) are always going to be needed for some people with learning disabilities and/or autism. Personally, I’m not sure such a sharp distinction is possible, desirable, represents reality, or necessarily means that we need the amount of secure/forensic inpatient services that exists today. In this blogpost I want to describe the range of inpatient services that exist, using Assuring Transformation data collated and analysed by NHS Digital. The Assuring Transformation dataset presents...