Restraints, assaults and self-harm in inpatient units
The BBC Panorama exposure of how people with learning disabilities were abused by staff was over 7 years ago now, and despite the ongoing ministrations of Transforming Care the litany of abusive practices in ‘specialist’ learning disability inpatient units and residential care homes continues to the present day, and no doubt into the future. Given what has happened at Winterbourne View and beyond, a central concern of the Transforming Care programme should be to ‘transform’ what actually happens to people in inpatient services. How many people, how often, experience different types of ‘restrictive intervention’ – physical restraint (including prone restraint where people are pinned to the floor), seclusion (solitary confinement), mechanical restraint (being physically contained so you can’t move), or being subjected to heavy duty medication? And that’s before you take into account self-harm or being physically assaulted by other people in the same place as you. Government initiatives s...