‘Autistic
children are routinely restrained and drugged in Care’
A
case study from an article in The Times on 18th May 2019
‘Bethany….. has
autism and suffers from extreme anxiety.
She was kept in seclusion for 21 months at St Andrew’s Hospital in
Northampton, locked in a room with only a mattress and chair, and was given
meals through a hatch in a metal door.
Staff at the psychiatric hospital which is run as a healthcare charity
facing sustained criticism over the high pay of former executives, said she was
aggressive and self-harmed’.
Now apparently, according to the Times (18/05/19), a CQC
report has been commissioned by Matt Hancock (the current Health Secretary)
after ‘revelations of abuse in mental
health institutions seven years after the Winterbourne View Care home scandal’. This report is expected to ‘reveal wide spread and regular use of “inhumane” techniques to control
both adult and child patients’. The
report will also highlight ‘the failure of health officials to create care
plans that would allow children to live at home’ (although I do wonder why CQC had to be specifically asked to do this ... why weren't they sufficiently on the ball to do it anyway?). Former Care Minister,
Norman Lamb, has apparently described the situation as an ‘on going scandal … serious
child abuse is endemic in the system!’
I have to say that I am not in the least surprised. As part of the Transforming Care initiative I
was (for a short while) involved in a very similar care i.e. a case of the continuous solitary confinement of an individual in a
privately run special hospital (he was also routinely fed through a hatch in the
door); it was heart-breaking to see. At
the time (which didn’t last long as the funding for my involvement was
time-limited and soon ran out) it did occur to me that there is a perverse incentive in the current
system of funding i.e. it pays such private companies (and charities with apparently
very highly paid executives) to have people remain in such conditions (despite these
services having beautifully and presumably expensively created websites that claim
the very best service values and practices).
Indeed at the time I did think that the severely
challenging behaviours exhibited by people in such “inhumane” conditions must,
to some degree, be reinforced by such conditions of powerlessness and futility,
if not actually exacerbated due to a downward reactive spiral of negative 'behavioural' consequences and brutalising control in such ‘modern day asylums’ (as Dan
Scorer of Mencap has described them) … and as also seen in last night’s BBC Panorama
programme about Whorlton Hall specialist hospital.
Remember, it is 7 years since the Winterbourne View scandal
(when 6 care staff were jailed - but none of the highly paid executives), but despite ‘speeches,
policy documents, steering groups and delivery groups’, the system
continues to fail those we have a societal obligation to properly care for, and to care about.
It makes me wonder just what the people in charge of
CQC have being doing?
Why isn’t sufficient regard given by those in positions of power to promoting the consistent use of positive means to develop sociability, rapport and trusting relationships within these apparently 'special' services for children and adults? ... in the adult Learning Disability ATU here in
Leeds Intensive Interaction is now routinely used with a range of our service users
to clearly positive effect.
And why does it take the media informed by whistle-blowers (and not CQC) to again show us that ‘the callous
clearly remains mundane in some parts of the health system’?
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