Mendip House - National Autistic Society

In August, the National Autistic Society had a CQC report of the service, Mendip House published in the media that said the service was unsatisfactory. Some of our family members asked us what we were going to do about this. The National Autistic Society has been a long term member of LDE (since when we were Housing Options, and then Housing & Support Alliance).

This is new ground for us as we have always been mainly a membership organisation for professional organisations.  In the past if one of our members failed people with learning disabilities, we would have contacted them privately and offered to help them to improve. We know that even good organisations make mistakes and we have always tried to take a helpful approach with our members and assume that they want to improve and support people with learning disabilities to lead good lives.

We facilitate the Driving Up Quality Code to enable providers to be transparent about what they do well and need to work on and we encourage all of our members to sign up to this code and publish self-assessments where they involve the people they support, families, board members and staff.  Some providers don’t do this self-assessment so we take them off the website. We have had to remove 2 providers (despite having done self-assessments) because of ongoing poor CQC inspection results and a clear inability to improve their services.

Our members are now also people with learning disabilities and families and we have a different responsibility to those members. One of the main ways we agreed to work together was to put people with learning disabilities at the centre of everything we do and be challenging when people are treated badly or discriminated against. This may sometimes mean that we have to challenge our organisational members. We will always do this in the spirit of transparency and a genuine desire to talk openly about the problems our members experience and how we can help to solve some of those problems.

We wrote to the National Autistic Society to tell them that some of our members were worried about their services - you can read our letter here. We asked them to respond to our members. They have responded - you can read their response here.  

The NAS will host an event in December 2016 to share what they have found about what went wrong and will invite some of our members, including self-advocates, families, providers and commissioners to come together and reflect on what went wrong, hear from other provider members, self-advocates, families and commissioners about their experience and talk about how we can make services better together. We will publish a report on what happens in that meeting.

We know that it can be challenging to bring different groups of people together to debate very sensitive issues, but we think that the only way forward is to be honest and open with each other. It is sad and worrying to see what happens to people with learning disabilities when their support organisation fails them but we welcome and support the NAS who have given us this opportunity to attempt to genuinely understand what has gone wrong and what we need to do to make things right. We hope that this process can also help other organisations. 

Statement on the Resignation of Katrina Percy

Learning Disability England is relieved to hear the news that Katrina Percy has resigned from her post as CEO of Southern Health Trust. The management team at Southern Health has presided over continual failings in delivery of care and this has been highlighted frequently in CQC and independent reports such as Mazars. We think that her resignation is long overdue and that the remaining management team should take a look at themselves and do what is respectful and just for all the people they have failed.

We are angry to see that Katrina Percy will continue to work as a consultant for Southern Health and take the same salary that she got as a CEO. This is wrong and makes her resignation a pretence. Her statement that she is leaving because of ‘media pressure’ is a denial that she was in charge of an organisation that continues to fail people with learning disabilities.

NHS Improvement say that to pay a CEO salary to do a lesser job is best value for money. They have not explained how they have come to that decision and they should explain. At a time when people with learning disabilities are told that there is not enough money for the support they need and have a right to, this is insulting. Katrina Percy (and any other manager that can’t do their job well) should not be rewarded for their failure.

LDE member and family carer Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole says:

“Why does the Ofsted chair, David Hoare, who said rude things about people in the Isle of Wight have to go straight away with no pay off and Katrina Percy doesn't.  Are the feelings of non-disabled people on the Isle of Wight more important than the lives of people with learning disabilities?  I genuinely do not understand why it has happened that way.”

LDE co-founder Gary Bourlet says:

"Katrina Percy has resigned but she's going straight into another job. She has not been punished, she should be taking responsibility. She'll have the same salary - she'll be alright but a lot of people have died. Others have to live the rest of their lives with that. This shows us just how bad attitudes towards people with learning disabilities are."

At Learning Disability England, we are asking our MPs to demand an inquiry into how Katrina Percy can still be paid the same as a CEO. We are also writing to NHS Improvement to ask how they made the decision that paying Katrina Percy the same was best value for money.

If you are angry too, we suggest that you write to your MP – you can find more information about this here. If you want NHS Improvement to explain, you can ask them here.