More than 2,000 people with autism or a learning disability are still locked in psychiatric wards despite a pledge to move hundreds into the community, figures have shown.
NHS England said that 2,295 people with learning disabilities were detained at mental health units last month. More than half had been held for at least two years and the vast majority were detained under the Mental Health Act, meaning they cannot choose to leave.
In 2015 the government set a target of having reduced their number by 35 to 50 per cent by this month. It has achieved a fall of about 500, about 19 per cent. In January the target was pushed back to 2024 when the NHS long-term plan was published.
Mencap, the learning disabilities charity, called the figures a scandal and demanded greater effort to fund supported community housing with suitably trained staff.
A scheme to move vulnerable adults from secure or residental units to supported community living began after Panorama on BBC One exposed staff beating residents at Winterbourne View, a private hospital in Hambrook, south Gloucestershire, in 2011.
The latest figures show that just under half of patients with autism or a learning disability were held on a secure ward, 40 per cent were being treated more than 30 miles from their family home and in the past month there were 2,505 incidents of patients being subjected to restrictive interventions, including 1,840 of physical restraint. Of the restraint cases, 820 involved children. The number of children with autism or a learning disability held in secure units has more than doubled to 250 since 2015.
Dan Scorer, Mencap’s head of policy, said: “Eight years on from the Winterbourne View scandal, where the public were made aware of the shocking abuses in an inpatient unit, it is clear that the government has failed to deliver on its promise to transform care. This is a domestic human rights scandal.”
Research by the University of Birmingham suggests that the main obstacles to relocation are a complex funding model and a shortage of supported community housing with specialist staff.
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “We are determined to reduce the number of people on the autism spectrum or with learning disabilities in mental health hospitals, and significant investment in community support has already led to a 20 per cent reduction.” NHS England said: “With parts of the country hitting ambitious targets, the long-term plan will build on progress, investing in earlier intervention and ramping up specialist community care.”
Case study
Jade Hutchings was 14 when, after talking an overdose while at school, she was taken to a general hospital and from there to a psychiatric hospital (Greg Hurst writes). Now aged 27, and after being moved to five different psychiatric units, she is still held on a secure ward despite a tribunal and a review saying she should be in community care.
Ms Hutchings, from Cotteridge in south Birmingham, was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome after about a year in the first psychiatric unit, Park View clinic in Birmingham.
Linda Hutchings, 55, her mother, a support worker for people with brain injuries, said she began to show obsessive behaviour after moving to secondary school and started to harm herself in her early teens. At Park View she stopped eating, which her mother said she copied from other young patients with eating disorders.
After several moves she is currently in a psychiatric ward in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire. Mrs Hutchings said all the wards have eased restrictions on patients gradually in response to co-operative behaviour but said that did not work with her daughter, who finds noise and volatile behaviour distressing.
“She has been in these institutions for 13, nearly 14 years and she has not got any better. In fact she has got worse. In terms of the social side of her development and her education and the health side it has all deteriorated because she has been locked up in closed environments,” Mrs Hutchings said.
“It’s heart breaking. We have always kept contact with her but all the mile-stones that you hope that your child is going to have we have never seen her do them because she has been locked away. As a parent all you ever want is for your child to be OK and for them to be happy.
“I think if we could have supported her in the community she could have had a more worthwhile life because she would have been with people who love her and be part of a peer group again.”
2,300 autistic patients are still locked up in hospital
