Last week, the government pledged to close up to 49 private hospitals that provide long-term accommodation for people with learning disabilities or autism. With the exposure of abuse at the Winterbourne View unit in 2011, the government pledged to move 3,250 people out of clinical environments, but this has yet to be achieved. Over the last 20 years people with learning disabilities and mental health problems have increasingly been housed in supported accommodation where they live more independently. The majority will either be in supported living accommodation, and receiving home help with shopping and cleaning as part of that support, or using daycare centres, all of which are unregulated by the CQC. Exasperated, Baker started an online campaign to improve mental health services and gathered over 700 signatures to a petition at her local station, which she presented to Downing Street last month.Īccording to the most recent figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre, there are 122,085 adults with serious mental health conditions living independently in England. The only thing that happened was the walls in the bedroom and sitting room were painted, carpet was laid to the sitting room and bedroom and new flooring in the kitchen.”īut when Baker wrote to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), she was informed that the regulator could not investigate because supported living accommodation is an unregulated service. “The bathroom was indescribable: black mould everywhere. “I have never seen such filthy, disgusting, unhygienic conditions in my entire life,” Baker says. Nicholas, 49, was keen to try to be independent and did not want his mother to visit him in his flat, so although she phoned him every day and did his shopping, it was not until he moved back to his mother’s home temporarily in December, when his flat was due to be refurbished, that she realised what squalor he had been living in.
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