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The ‘restrictive interventions’ (or more bluntly restraint, seclusion and segregation) being used by inpatient services on people with learning disabilities or autistic people has been gaining some public and political attention, thanks to the doughty work of many campaigners and journalists. The Secretary of State for Health (and Care – remember what that is?) has commissioned the Care Quality Commission to “ review the use of restraint, prolonged seclusion and segregation for people with mental health, a learning disability and/or autism ”. Before today (17 January 2019) there have been no publicly available statistics on what inpatient units are doing to people with learning disabilities or autistic people in inpatient units in terms of ‘restrictive interventions’ since information collected from the last Learning Disability Inpatient Census in September 2015 ( see this blogpost for details) . Recently, both radio (File On 4) and TV (Sky News) gained and made public data from NHS Di...

This year I’ve going to try and write slightly more blogposts than last year (don’t say you weren’t warned), with a focus on information rather than opinion where possible. So, on the day when the NHS Long Term Plan is published, it makes perfect sense to start with a blogpost on… social care. This post will look at trends in the data produced by NHS Digital on social care statistics related to adults with learning disabilities. There will be graphs. Councils with social services responsibilities return information to NHS Digital every year on how many adults are using various forms of social care, and how much councils spend on social care (this doesn’t include other types of state funding relevant to social care, such as housing benefit as part of supported living support). When looking at trends over time it’s important to remember that there were big changes in the way information was collected between 2013/14 and 2014/15, the one with the biggest impact being that up to 2013/14 mo...