Editor’s blog – April 2019
Simon Jarrett gives a preview of some of what you will find in our current issue
The malaise that lies below Transforming Care
The Transforming Care programme has come to an end in a rather quiet, shamefaced way. As our article in our current April 2019 issue (The sorry failure of an ambitious plan) highlights, it has had only a small impact. The programme made big promises, back in 2015, that it would make significant inroads into the scandalous numbers of people with learning disabilities detained in ‘assessment and treatment’ centres and other ‘specialised’ health settings. Often these people are detained far from home and family in unsympathetic, to say the least, clinical environments. Too frequently they find themselves in a nightmarish Catch-22 world where they are detained because of their ‘behaviours’. and yet their treatment serves only to reinforce and worsen those behaviours, thereby justifying further detention.
There has only been a small dent in the numbers detained under these scandalous circumstances. There are still well over 2,000 people waiting for their care to be transformed, just as there were three years ago, despite all the investment and initiatives. The majority of them have been detained for over two years. As numerous press and television exposés have shown, Individuals and families continue to suffer what is nothing less than persistent, gross abuses of human rights. The public cannot claim that they do not know.
Whatever the faults that characterise the way in which the programme was structured and implemented, a deeper malaise lies beneath it. A careless government has allowed a group of complex people to become commodified, human cash-cows bringing in enormous fees – sometimes more than £500,000 a year – for highly leveraged private companies who milk profit from the system. Shamefully, some supposedly non-profit organisations do the same. It is in their interests to detain such people for as long as possible, preferably indefinitely, to boost their business model. This is a human, moral, and financial scandal, and Transforming Care has not laid it to rest. At its heart lie ruined, wasted lives, abusive systems of care and a gross abuse of public funds, as Simon Duffy so brilliantly highlights in his column. (Ending institutional abuse scandals)
As Sue Ledger’s article on ‘Staying Local’ shows (Stories show the way to stay home), there is another way. People can be diverted from this abusive system, and lead fulfilled lives in their communities. It is not easy – these can be people who have complex needs and require intensive support. To make this work locally, outside the institution, requires imagination, flexibility, innovation and, most of all, understanding and respect for each individual concerned, coupled with a belief in their right and ability to lead a full human life. It also requires money – but a fraction of what is poured into the medicalised system that currently ruins people’s lives. Transforming Care is over. The fight goes on.
Good cheer
Our interview by Sean Kelly with the founder and staff of Ignition Brewery in London (Success in a bottle) shows what happens when somebody looks at an old situation with a new eye. Nick O’Shea, an economist, met a group of people with learning disabilities and was shocked to see that while they all wanted to work, and all appeared to be employable, none of them were employed. As an economist he knew that brewing is an area in which start-up businesses can thrive, and is also labour-intensive with a range of skills suitable for a diverse workforce. The result? A successful small brewery and a bar, employing mostly people with learning disabilities.
As the experience of the Transforming Care programme shows, top-down plans devised by large bureaucracies will fail if they stifle innovation, imagination and vision, and crush independent thought. Fortunately, there are people, like Nick O’Shea, who see things differently. In the world of Ignition Brewery beer is a commodity, people with learning disabilities are not. That is called seeing things the right way round,
Simon Jarrett Editor
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