I can only speak for Leeds, but this kind of abuse is certainly not endemic. Most Learning Difficulty (LD) clients no longer live in hotels but in individual tenancies with staff supervision being a light touch approach. Only the very profound cases are in hostels due to complex needs. Autonomy is encouraged wherever possible and the clients even have their own council where they have a say, limited obviously, in how their lives are run. But then Leeds City Council, being a little more ‘backwards’ has most of it’s LD community still in public care.
There will always be bad staff but the panorama program shows what happens when the management team is not functioning and there are some bad/abusive staff. This is more difficult to police in an outsourced provider as they tend to be at arms length. Also, the CQC gets inundated with disgruntled staff making allegations, it really is a wheat from chaff job and unfortunately some slip through although this is not good enough and measures should be put in place to prevent this in future.
One of the previous posts alluded to the fact that we chuck our vunerable into care rather than look after them. Again a misconception, most of the LD community live at home with carers and attend day centres and also have council respite care a few weeks a year to give the carers a break. Even these day centres are being reworked and rather than lumping them all in one building there is a drive to give them personal choice and to allow more intergration into the wider community by visiting and using public facilities and other leisure places. Funny enough the areas where this is more likely to be resisted is the affluent areas of Leeds with the poorer sink estate type of area far being more welcoming and helpful.
There will always be bad staff but the panorama program shows what happens when the management team is not functioning and there are some bad/abusive staff. This is more difficult to police in an outsourced provider as they tend to be at arms length. Also, the CQC gets inundated with disgruntled staff making allegations, it really is a wheat from chaff job and unfortunately some slip through although this is not good enough and measures should be put in place to prevent this in future.
One of the previous posts alluded to the fact that we chuck our vunerable into care rather than look after them. Again a misconception, most of the LD community live at home with carers and attend day centres and also have council respite care a few weeks a year to give the carers a break. Even these day centres are being reworked and rather than lumping them all in one building there is a drive to give them personal choice and to allow more intergration into the wider community by visiting and using public facilities and other leisure places. Funny enough the areas where this is more likely to be resisted is the affluent areas of Leeds with the poorer sink estate type of area far being more welcoming and helpful.
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