Partners publish progress report on transforming care for people with learning disabilities

Today (Friday 3 July), the Department of Health, Local Government Association, the Association of Directors of Social Services, Health Education England and the Care Quality Commission have published a joint report giving an update on how we are continuing to work together to make sure people with learning disabilities and/or autism with mental illness, and those with challenging behaviours get the best care possible in settings that are most appropriate to them.

Our update follows Sir Stephen Bubb’s independent review into the future care of people with learning disabilities, which published in November 2014 and followed the serious failings in care identified in Winterbourne View in 2011.

The review made a series of recommendations for the NHS, local government, regulators and the government that included a robust NHS commissioning framework to support people with learning disabilities and autism move out of hospitals and into the community.

In January 2015, the national partners published its response to Sir Stephen’s Bubb’s review and committed to work together more effectively, to drive forward change.

Today’s report provides an update on how these commitments from the Transforming Care Programme have progressed.

It states that there has been progress, such as a public consultation on strengthening individual rights, testing service redesign and more robust ways of collecting and sharing data, and developing care reviews to prevent unnecessary hospital admissions and lengthy stays. However, there is still much to do to make sure that where it is appropriate, people are cared for in the community and close to home.

In this time, we have continued our new approach to inspecting health and social care services across England, which assesses whether services are safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well-led. A key part of this is developing how we obtain the views of people who use services about the nature and quality of the care they are receiving. Since the publication of Sir Stephen Bubb’s report we have also focused in on learning disability services and made sure that its inspection methods fit the model of care being delivered by them.

Also, we are further developing our work on registration, to make sure that inappropriate models of care for people with learning disabilities do not continue after providers have applied to vary the type of service that they wish to offer, and for new applications to only be agreed if they reflect the agreed model of care, which is currently being defined by the Transforming Care Programme.

For further information, see NHS England's page on Transforming Care