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Following some recent conversations on twitter, this post provides a quick update on what national statistics tell us about how many adults with learning disabilities are involved in Section 42 safeguarding processes in England (again NHS Digital produce annual reports about these statistics ). The first thing to say is that much less information is reported publicly about safeguarding specifically for adults with learning disabilities than previously, mainly due to concerns about the quality of the information (these are still officially 'experimental statistics'). This also means that there have been a few changes to how the information has been collected from 2010/11 to 2016/17, so it's hard to draw strong conclusions about changes over time. The first graph below shows how many adults with learning disabilities (vs how many other adults in total) have been recorded in the safeguarding statistics over time. In 2016/17 there were 14,890 adults with learning disabilities i...

I’ve gone on about this subject so much in this blog that I’m sure you’re as heartily sick of it as I am, but once again I’ve been worrying away at statistics about people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people in inpatient services. To try and recap, pithily… Exhibit A. The Assuring Transformation dataset is produced and reported monthly by NHS Digital for the NHS England Transforming Care programme, based on health service commissioners’ reports on the number of people in specialist inpatient services for people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people. Exhibit B. The newer Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS) is also produced and reported monthly by NHS Digital, based on mental health service providers’ reports on the number of people flagged as learning disabled and/or autistic in any inpatient mental health service. There is some overlap between the two datasets but also some big differences, with Assuring Transformation recording fewer people overall, and ...

This blogpost is updating a post I did a few months ago about how many people were being admitted to inpatient units for people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people. In the light of the experiences of people like Eden , who has ended up being sent back to an inpatient unit only recently after leaving several years spent in them, I want to see if the statistics can tell us anything about people going back into inpatient units (otherwise known as readmissions). This blogpost uses information from the Assuring Transformation dataset , which is updated monthly by @NHSDigital. When reading this blogpost, it’s worth remembering that Assuring Transformation statistics are submitted by commissioners, who tend to focus on people in specialist learning disability inpatient services who spend relatively long periods there. Another dataset, the Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS), focuses more on people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people in shorter-term general ment...

Today (6 th March 2018) @NHSBenchmarking held an event releasing the findings from their most recent round of data collection concerning NHS/health services for people with learning disabilities. This is a project that’s been going for a few years, where volunteer organisations (mainly NHS Trusts) across the UK help NHS Benchmarking collect information about health services for people with learning disabilities. I think 47 organisations took part in 2015/16, and 49 organisations took part in 2017. I think this project is really important, because it tries to collect information that isn’t available in any other way (although there is a strong case to be made that much of this information should be routinely collected nationally). It also tries to collect information about some of the kinds of community-based health services that the NHS England strategy Building The Right Support says are needed, if people with learning disabilities or autistic people aren’t going to keep being unnec...