Wednesday, August 08, 2012

The 'Don't Care Homes' - A Disgrace

Often this blog points out the flaws in the current state of affairs, but sometimes even the most right-wing press can see the  bright light of truth shining though. From the pages of the Torygraph today, with our emphasis placed in some parts:

"A private care home for severely disabled people put its own profits before basic humanity, a scathing inquiry into abuse has found. Regulators, police, social services and the NHS are all heavily criticised in an official report for failing to pick up warning signs about the treatment of patients at the Winterbourne View home in Gloucestershire.

It was published after 11 members of staff at the home pleaded guilty to almost 40 charges of neglect and ill treatment of people with severe learning difficulties in their care. The scandal only came to light after an undercover reporter for the BBC’s Panorama programme filmed abuse taking place after being tipped off by Terry Bryan, a former senior nurse.
The footage showed frail and confused residents being forcibly pinned to the ground by groups of staff, beaten, soaked with water, trapped under chairs and having their hair pulled and eyes poked.

But Dr Margaret Flynn, who conducted the Serious Case Review into events at the home, said yesterday that the crimes which came to light are likely to be only the “tip of the iceberg”. She found that there was “institutional abuse” of patients with restraint used on a daily basis and that vulnerable patients were “chronically under-protected”. She said that had it not been for the undercover report the abuse would have taken a very long time to come to light, if ever.
But she noted that even after the BBC raised the alarm one patient was kept under restraint for 11 hours.

Mr Bryan contacted the programme after his own warnings to staff and the regulator, the Care Quality Commission, CQC, fell on deaf ears. The review found that there had been ample evidence over three years pointing to a pattern of abuse but that the authorities had failed to take it seriously or act on it.

Dr Flynn found that Castlebeck Ltd, the private company which owned the home, had failed to act on concerns from its own staff, internal reports about incidents in which patients were hurt and its own human resources records showing that it had a serious shortage of properly trained staff. The management made no attempt to question why restraint was used so routinely or even whether it was legal, she said.

Instead it regarded the home, which charged the taxpayer an average of £182,000 a year and had a turnover of £3.7 million, as the “best performer” in its group. “Castlebeck Ltd appears to have made decisions about profitability, including shareholder returns, over and above decisions about the effective and humane delivery of assessment, treatment and rehabilitation,” she concluded. 

Meanwhile Avon and Somerset Police had 29 separate contacts with the home in the three years leading up to the exposures but failed to notice a pattern of abuse, the report says. South Gloucestershire Council received 40 so-called “safeguarding alerts” about vulnerable patients but did not detect the abuse.

Meanwhile, even when Mr Bryan contacted the CQC directly with an email entitled “I’ve Had Enough”, the watchdog failed to contact him or even class him as a whistleblower. Another member of staff also contacted the watchdog but there is no record of her call, the report notes.

“The Review confirms that the apparatus of oversight across sectors was unequal to the task of uncovering the fact and extent of abuses and crimes at Winterbourne View Hospital,” she concludes.

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As the report says, this is merely the tip of the iceburg and it is aan outrage against basic human dignities. The only positive thing in this report is the fact that the abuse, neglect and the shocking indictment of the failure of the authorities to act has correctly identified  the motive: PROFIT.

It is not enough to read about this though: if this has made you angry and you can see as well the reasons behind it, then DO SOMETHING about getting rid of this nasty, inhumane, system forever and start building a new future, a socialist future where incidences like this are consigned to the memories of the 'bad old days' forever.
SussexSocialist



1 comment:

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