With increasing use of private sector hospitals, the patients with complex learning disabilities have been left at risk of abuse and poor care, as the system is fragmented and split between different agencies at both a national and local level, NHS Providers, which represents NHS hospitals, has warned.
The services are poorly placed to meet patient needs and the situation is made worse by a stigma against learning disabilities coupled with cuts to hospital and community service budgets leaving thousands of patients locked up in institutional care, as per a news report in The Independent.
In a new report, NHS Providers said there was “clear evidence of historical inequity” in the way services for people with learning disability and autism were commissioned by NHS England which it said, “left these groups of service users disadvantaged in terms of their health and wellbeing, life chances and expectancy, and in extreme cases open to abuse.”
The Care Quality Commission rated more than 80 percent of NHS hospital wards for people with learning disabilities as good or outstanding in April this year. Almost a quarter of independent hospitals, 22 percent, were rated inadequate by the regulator, a jump from 5 percent in July 2019.
NHS Providers said examples like the abuse of patients at Whorlton Hall in 2019 showed progress on improving care was “unacceptably slow.”
Saffron Cordery, NHS Providers deputy chief executive said NHS England should stop commissioning hospitals centrally itself and instead allow services to be developed locally.
She told The Independent: “I don’t think the way that services are commissioned and delivered puts us in a position to be genuinely confident about quality across the board.
“We need to make sure that the public, politicians, service users, and their families, have confidence in the services that are both commissioned, and provided. That has to be our fundamental starting point. What happened at Whorlton Hall and previous events have highlighted the fact that on occasions people can’t be confident in the services that are provided.”
She said mainstream NHS services would not be provided in the same way and care for learning disability patients had suffered “more atomization and fragmentation” adding: “I would trace that back to the root cause of it being a stigmatized service that hasn’t come front and center of people’s minds.
“It is much easier to hold NHS services to account. They sit as part of a wider trust and health system. What we have got is a situation where because of the nature of the provision, we aren’t seeing the same level of focus on quality improvement that you get when it sits within an NHS trust for example.
