Winterbourne legacy highlights rift on abuse

Sunil Peck & Ian Macrae

The regulator of the care system, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), does have the resources to carry out its duties, the care services minister has claimed.

Speaking to Disability Now magazine after the Panorama programme exposing the abuse of disabled people at Winterbourne View, Paul Burstow denied that cuts had left the regulator with too few inspectors to carry out inspections.

“Last October I sanctioned the recruitment of a further 75 inspectors at the Care Quality Commission’s request so the CQC is being given the tools to do the job. They have accepted that they need to look critically at whether they’re doing the job in the right way in the light of what happened at Winterbourne View, and they need to look critically at this specific case and the way in which staff handled the whistle-blower.”

But Care activist Baroness Campbell of Surbiton says she believes that too little has been done and that the minister needs to recognise that there are fundamental flaws throughout the care system which need to be addressed by Government.

“Paul Burstow said ‘it shouldn’t be investigated, it should be stopped’. I wish I had his faith in the health and social care system to stop this happening.

“Disabled people, who are the experts by experience of institutional abuse, will tell you; all the training and professional management in the world will never prevent abuse behind closed doors. There must always be procedures for serious investigation followed by appropriate tough punishment and sanction.”

The BBC Panorama programme featured scenes covertly filmed by an undercover reporter.  The footage showed that patients were regularly pinned down, beaten and otherwise verbally and physically abused.  

One whistle-blower described the treatment of patients at the privately run, tax-payer funded Bristol hospital as “torture”.

The hospital provided care and treatment for people with learning difficulties and autism.

Since the programme was screened, the CQC has come in for criticism for its failure to identify the home, pick up the abuse and exercise its regulatory powers.

But when asked whether he thought the regulator was fit for purpose, the minister said that he was awaiting the results of reviews by the Care Quality Commission and South Gloucestershire Council.

“The nature of this process is that we’re asking those questions. It would be a bit foolish for a minister to reach a judgement before he had the conclusions of the process.”

The abuse at Winterbourne View follows similar cases in Cornwall and Sutton and Merton in Surrey, the minister’s own parliamentary constituency. So does Paul Burstow agree with campaigners like Baroness Campbell who have demanded the closure of such care settings?

“I’m a very strong advocate for models of care that promote autonomy and independence for individuals, and supportive models of care are a very important part of where we need the system to move. But inevitably there will be a smaller part of the most severely disabled population who may need the more intensive support.

“From my own experience as a constituency MP in Sutton, we have a situation where there is now no institutionalised care, it’s all supported living and the outcomes for the individuals are very encouraging so I think that’s the way to go.”

Paul Burstow can understand why disabled people and the families of people in care settings would have been left feeling “horrified” by the Panorama programme. But he appears reluctant to accept that Winterbourne View might not be the exception in today’s care system.

“Whilst I don’t want to believe that there is a situation that is far more deep-seated than Winterbourne, we have to show due diligence. That’s why we’re conducting all of these other examinations – to satisfy ourselves that this was an exception.”

The minister dismisses the view that the likelihood of badly run care settings which employ staff on the cheap to maximise their profits is increased because so many institutions are privately run. He points out that the abuse in Sutton and Merton took place in an NHS-run institution.

“That’s a completely fallacious argument and misses the point that 78 per cent of social care in England is provided by the private sector. Much of that is good and one of my roles is to make sure that we have a system that delivers good quality care whether its provided by the public, private or voluntary sector.

“There’s no one single silver bullet that we can fire that fixes this sort of issue, that’s why we’re having all these different inquiries and we’ll be pulling them together as a department to get a comprehensive overview of the lessons that need to be learned. It has to be about what we can do to minimise risk and it has to be about making sure that the whole approach to the safeguarding of vulnerable adults and adults at risk is imbedded into the way in which we train and supervise staff, and is very much part of the day to day practice of any organisation charged with providing care.”

Meanwhile, Baroness Campbell of Surbiton has told Disability Now that she is very disappointed by the CQC’s lack of appropriate response to events at Winterbourne View.

“Surely it isn’t good enough for the hospital management line of command to get off without their negligence in failures being seriously investigated under the Human Rights Act, or for the CQC to suggest their failure to act sooner was partly due to local authority intransigence and Panorama not showing them the footage sooner. All these negligent actions are reprehensible.