State of Care: learning disability and autism

In this year’s State of care annual report, CQC highlights its concerns about specific service areas, in particular those that care for people with a learning disability and autistic people – areas where inspections continue to find issues with culture, leadership, and a lack of genuine engagement with people who use services.

In our first blog we summarised the key messages in the CQC's report and in this second blog, we look at chapter 4 of the report covering learning disability and autism – see pages 65 – 69.

There are five key points to note:

• CQC state that care for people with learning disability or autism is still not good enough. They reference back to their Out of Sight – who cares report.
• Although they are able to report that the number of people with a learning disability in hospital has halved since March 2015, they are concerned that there are still too many people in hospital. More worryingly they note that the number of autistic people in hospital has increased considerably over the same period.
• With regard to Right Support, Right Care, Right Culture they reference a “lack of commitment” in some areas to following this guidance so that, combined with local financial pressures, means they are seeing providers wanting to register services that do not meet good practice standards.
• Over the past year CQC have taken more enforcement action against adult social care providers of services for people with a learning disability and autistic people.
• Early findings of their review into the experiences of those with a learning disability or autism in acute hospitals will be published soon.