The Making Positive Moves team were extremely angry and sad to see about the abuse that BBC Panarama uncovered recently in one of the UK’s largest mental health hospitals. We wanted to discuss the abuse at the Edenfield Centre in our steering group meeting and share our response to this.
BBC Panorama yet again exposed abuse, mistreatment and inappropriate use of restraints and seclusion at one of the largest mental health hospitals in the UK. The hospital is a secure unit set up to care for those who have been held under the Mental Health Act due to serious risk of self-harm or harm to others. This includes individuals with autism and learning difficulties. The Making Positive Moves team saw it as crucial to discuss the abuse at the Edenfield Centre in our steering group meeting because our research is all about Transforming Care which was set up in a response to the Winterbourne View Scandal. We were extremely angry but sadly not surprised to learn about the ongoing abuse of vulnerable adults.
The documentary showed an undercover reporter, Alan Haslam, going into the Edenfield Centre and starting work as a support worker wearing a hidden camera. The hidden camera recorded the following forms of abuse:
- Staff slapping patients, mocking patients, and swearing at them
- Inappropriate use of restraints
- Inappropriate use of seclusion in tight and bare rooms (some held in those rooms for months)
- Failure to complete patient observations
This Panorama is the latest investigation showing abuse of people with mental health needs in hospital, and echos the findings of the 2011 Panorama exposé into Winterbourne View, an Assessment and Treatment Unit for adults with learning disabilities. In response to the Winterbourne View scandal, the government launched the Transforming Care programme. The programme aimed to move people with learning disabilities and autism out of hospitals and reduce their admissions to mental health hospitals.
“It is upsetting and frustrating to see repeated exposures of scandal, abuse and insufficient care for people with mental health needs. We know that many people with learning disabilities are best supported in the community rather than inpatient units, and we hope that our ongoing research will extend our original findings and help us to understand, directly from people with learning disabilities, how to best support community living and prevent re-admissions”
Dr Silvana Mengoni, Academic Lead for the Making Positive Moves project
Our research project began as reaction to the Winterbourne View scandal and the Government initiative of the Transforming Care programme. Currently, there is a lack of research into the views and experience of those who have moved through the Transforming Care programme. The aim of our project is to identify factors that make living in the community a success after moving out of mental health hospitals, Assessment and Treatment Units and/or forensic institutions through the Transforming Care programme. We are doing this through interviewing individuals with learning disabilities, and they tell us what has helped and what has not helped them to remain in the community.
Through contact with families linked to our steering group members and our associated projects, it was clear that it is not just people from the Panorama programmes but people with learning disabilities across the country have had similar experiences. This raises important questions:
- Why is such abuse allowed to continue? And why hasn’t such abuse and mistreatment been identified and addressed?
- CQC had previously rated Edenfield as ‘Good’ – how was this rating achieved – were patients in the inpatient units spoken to during inspections?
We argue that when someone uses behaviours which are deemed challenging, this needs to be seen as a response to their environment, their distress and their experiences of trauma and abuse within hospital systems, rather than solely due to their learning disability and/or a diagnosis of a mental health condition.
In our original study (Head et al, 2018), in the ‘moving process’ phase, we interviewed people with learning disabilities about their experiences of moving out of the hospitals. We reported that people had formed restricted and often negative stories of themselves while they were in hospital. Their behaviour was viewed as “bad” by staff, and they in turn thought of themselves as “bad” people. This could make people with learning disabilities more vulnerable to abuse as they may start to believe that it is their fault, and they deserve such treatment. This highlights the negative impact of abuse on these individuals and the importance of the need to understand what makes the moves into the community a success. Through supporting successful community living, the revolving door of repeated admissions can be stopped. This is what we are hoping to achieve as part of our current Making Positive Moves study, the ‘living process.’
Our research team are currently interviewing people with learning disabilities who have moved out of mental health hospitals, Assessment and Treatment Units and/or forensic institutions under the Transforming Care programme. We are finding out what it is like to live in the community after moving out of the hospital under the Transforming Care programme and understand what helps and what does not help to stay in the community in the long term. Through their experiences we hope to gather evidence on what works for people who have moved out of hospitals under the Transforming Care to live successfully in the community. The findings can help improve policy and practise about supporting people in the community after moving out of mental health hospitals and hopefully it will help reduce admissions and readmissions to mental health hospitals.
Please get in touch if you would like to share your thoughts and comments. You can contact us at hello@makingpositivemoves.org or contact us through our social media.
