Employment, Health, Mental health, Wellbeing

Employers’ public health role

May 14, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

Working-age ill-health costs the UK economy an annual £100bn, and in a piece for the Guardian online, I give a snapshot of what some employers are doing to improve the health of their staff.

It might be easy to dismiss lunchtime yoga sessions or in-house physio clinics as optional extras (or a “perk”) but the stats on workplace illness suggests a focus on wellbeing makes economic sense. More days are lost through staff sickness in the NHS than elsewhere in the public sector (according to the government’s 2009 Boorman Report) and sick leave costs the health service £1.7bn a year.

Employers are starting to recognise their public health role; almost 400 organisations have, according to latest figures, pledged support for the Department of Health’s public health “responsibility deal”.

You can read the full piece, part of a supplement on physiotherapy, here.

Cuts, Disability, Employment, Learning disability, Local government, Uncategorized

Cutting employment support for learning disabled people is a false economy

May 5, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

Richard Ward has barely taken a day off sick since he started working 15 years ago. His friendly nature and keen eye for detail suit his role at a Boots store in Coventry, date-checking food, stacking shelves and helping customers find what they want. Ward, 33, says: “I like earning my own money, getting on well with the staff, seeing different people every day and it gets me out of the house.” Ward earns £600 a month, just over the national minimum wage.

Ward lives with his parents in Walsgrave, Coventry, and was referred to a local jobs support service by his special school; mainstream job agencies and government-run employment schemes would consider him unemployable. His mother Jane says he would be on benefits without the specialist job advice, coaching and long-term support from Coventry city council’s The Employment Support Service (TESS) for people with learning disabilities or mental health issues.

As I explain in the Guardian, while the general unemployment rate is falling, the number of out of work adults with severe learning disabilities or mental health issues who don’t have a job is on the rise. Last year, only 6.8% of learning disabled people using social care were in work compared with 7% in 2012-13. The corresponding rate for people using acute mental health services was 7.1% in 2014, compared with 7.7% the previous year.

Learning disability is not on most politicians’ radars, despite people who have learning disabilities, or who have someone with a learning disability in their immediate family, making up 10% of the electorate. A recent poll of 100 MPs by social care provider Dimensions suggests 60% do not believe that learning disabled people can be supported into employment.

However, Ward’s job is under threat, along with those of another 100 people TESS currently supports to maintain employment and the 30 it helps annually into new jobs. The Labour-run council has earmarked the nationally acclaimed 22-year-old service for closure, a victim of public sector cuts. Its future after this December is unclear.

Coventry is not unique; supported employment is a Cinderella service, not a local government statutory requirement. A 2011 poll by the British Association for Supported Employment (BASE) of 50 of its members found half face council funding cuts of at least 15% and a quarter fear 50% to 100% cuts.

The situation in Coventry has sparked worries for families of younger disabled people elsewhere. They warn that supported employment cuts are at odds with special educational needs and disability reforms aimed at raising the aspirations of future generations.

In a joint comment Sherann Hillman co-chair of the National Network of Parent Carer Forums (NNPCF) and Sue North from Contact a Family said: “Parent carers of young people with disabilities and special educational needs say fear for their child’s future is one of their top concerns. This is because young people with special educational needs and disability are less likely to find employment and live independently – and face other additional barriers as they grow up. Any threats to provisions such as supported employment schemes, will inevitably compound these fears and worries.

People TESS supports spoke in its defence at a public meeting last week organised by local unions. Among them was Hayley Archer, who has a learning disability. Her mother, Suzanne, stresses the wider impact of supported employment must be recognised: “People like Hayley are changing society’s attitudes by having a role in the workplace and by working alongside people without learning disabilities.”

Archer herself, an administrative apprentice at the council, has a simple request for her future: “I really want to keep working.”

You can read the full piece here.

media & communication, Music & arts, Uncategorized

Crowdsourced art project maps our democratic history

April 2, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

Digital art project Democracy Street allows users to share pictures taken on mobiles. — Digital art project Democracy Street allows mobile users to share pictures reflecting the country’s parliamentary history.

With the election a few weeks away, democracy is the timely subject of a new digital art project designed to shed light on Britain’s parliamentary history.

Democracy Street is curated by artist Jon Adams who has Asperger’s syndrome – a form of autism – and I wanted to briefly mention the crowdsourced project today, on World Autism Awareness Day. Adams’ work focuses “on arts sciences and creativity as a person with Aspergers, including synaesthesia, systemising and sequencing”.

Participants in Democracy Street can use mobiles to take photos that contribute to the digital project.

The Houses of Parliament have commissioned the project with support from The Speaker’s Art Fund and Arts Council England. A mobile web app allows users to explore and discover streets that have a connection to democracy and upload their own images. Images can include, for example, streets that share the same name as a Parliamentarian or that reflect events in democratic history. Adams will use the data generated by users to create new artistic maps of the UK and as users upload information, it appears on the web app, so you can see the crowdsourced project developing in real time.

The participatory scheme also coincides with the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and the 750th birthday of Parliament.

More information here.

Abuse, Bullying, Disability, Health, Learning disability

Poor care for people with learning disabilities

March 25, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

Robin Kitt Callender who died after missed opportunities to save her life (pic: Callender family)

By the time Robin Kitt Callender died, she had endured eight weeks of intermittent vomiting and diarrhoea, and her weight had fallen to five stone. In the four months before she collapsed at her Essex care home, the 53-year-old had visited her GP six times and A&E twice, but her inflammatory bowel disease remained undiagnosed.

Callender, who was severely autistic and partially sighted, with communication difficulties, died on 23 May 2012, less than 24 hours after finally being admitted to hospital.

An inquest last week concluded that she died from natural causes contributed to by neglect, with failings by her GP and hospital staff and missed opportunities to save her. Care home staff took her to the doctor, but failed to tell her sister (who usually accompanied her to medical appointments) of the severe symptoms until the day before she died.

There are 1,200 avoidable deaths of learning-disabled people in the NHS every year, according to Mencap’s research into “death by indifference”. A government-commissioned confidential inquiry into the premature deaths of people with a learning disability found that, on average, people die 16 years sooner than in the general population, with many deaths avoidable.

Among the families seeking answers and lobbying for change is that of Connor Sparrowhawk. Two years ago this month, the 18-year-old, who had a learning disability and epilepsy, was admitted to a specialist NHS inpatient unit in Oxford and drowned in the bath less than four months later. His preventable death led to the Justice for LB campaign and an inquest is due this summer.

The circumstances in the cases of Sparrowhawk and Callender are very different, but the principle is the same: people with a learning disability are dying because they do not receive the same quality of care as other people.

There’s more of my piece in The Guardian.

Uncategorized

Mental health: using song to break stigma

March 23, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

The project Creative Madness in Song raises awareness about mental ill health (pic: Song in the City)

Yanamah was “drowning in the depths of despair…yearning for a glimpse of kindness and a friendly gesture”. Before her mental health deteriorated, as she wrote in a recent poem, she was “a woman of distinction” but now she is “forgotten and lost”. Her words, set to classical song, form part of a groundbreaking arts project to break down barriers about mental health and introduce audiences to a new genre of music.

The Creative Madness in Song project is run by charity Song in the City with The Maudsley Charity, part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. The awareness-raising drive involves composers working with texts written by people with experience of conditions such as schizophrenia and depression; the songs are performed by classically-trained singers and pianists.

Young composers and people with experience of mental illness have collaborated to produce songs that include compelling descriptions of being sectioned and frank accounts of life with mental illness. There are two two free public concerts in London this week, tomorrow at St Mary’s Church, near Lewisham Hospital, and Wednesday 25 March at Guy’s Chapel, Guy’s Hospital.

The concerts are in partnership with Breathe Arts Health Research, a social enterprise that develops artistic projects in healthcare.

My full piece on the innovative programme can be read here on the social care pages of the Guardian.

Abuse, Bullying, Disability, Domestic violence, Health, Housing, Learning disability, Local government, Social care, Women

The hidden victims of domestic violence

February 11, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

Beverley Lewis House is the only refuge in the UK that caters for women who have learning disabilities. Photograph: Beverley Lewis House

Barbara Davis’s abusive boyfriend burned her fingers on the stove when he discovered her packed suitcase under the bed and realised she was trying to leave. He had controlled Davis, 36, who has a mild learning disability, for years. He isolated her from family and friends, verbally abusing her parents until they stopped visiting. He locked her in the privately rented London flat they shared, goading her to kill herself. She recalls: “He told me to strangle myself with a wire … he wanted me to die.”

Davis (who eventually escaped) told her story to researchers from the Tizard Centre as part of a project to explores the experiences women with learning disabilities who suffer domestic violence. The work, which also looks at the attitudes and practices of professionals who support such women, is featured in my Guardian piece.

There are some shocking – although perhaps not surprising (given the low profile of learning disability as an issue) – facts included in the piece. Among them, that the UK has just one specialist domestic violence refuge for women with learning disabilities. What’s more, most police officers (often the first point of contact in a domestic abuse incident) do not believe that a learning disability makes women more vulnerable to domestic violence.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

The Tizard Centre project can be accessed here and information on Beverley Lewis House here.

Abuse, Disability, Learning disability, Social care, Social exclusion, Third sector, Uncategorized, Young people

Exhibition reveals hidden history of learning disability

January 19, 2015 Saba Salman Leave a comment

All images copyright Jürgen Schadeberg

Powerful and rarely seen archive images of life in institutional care form part of a new exhibition that opens today.

The history of long-stay hospitals in Wales is the focus of Mencap Cymru’s Hidden Now Heard project that documents life for people with learning disabilities in the region.

The striking shots of the long-since closed institutions include rarely seen images of Hensol Hospital, Vale of Glamorgan, taken by renowned photographer Jürgen Schadeberg in 1967.

Schadeberg’s Welsh photographs range from the surprising to the thought-provoking and the unsettling. They focus on individual faces and personalities at a time when people with learning disabilities were invisible, herded into high-walled hospitals, hidden away for years.

The images hint at stark reality of life in long-term care, reflecting some of the isolation and inactivity that were its hallmarks. They show patients in workshops and in and around the hospital grounds. However, the photographs also depict some of the positive bonds between staff and children in their care.

Hensol opened in 1930 as a “colony” for the care of 100 male “mental defectives” (standard terminology at the time) with buildings added to raise numbers 460 male, female and child patients in 1935. The move towards community care meant that patient numbers eventually reduced and the institution closed in 2003. Some of the buildings are now luxury flats.

The project provokes the public to consider how we care for and treat people with learning disabilities today.

While life in the community is meant to have replaced segregation in institutions, some 2,600 people with learning disabilities or autism are stuck in the kind of units meant to be consigned to the history books. These include assessment and treatment centres run by the NHS and private companies, like the Winterbourne View unit. The preventable death of Connor Sparrowhawk (aka Laughing Boy or LB) in one of these “waste bins of life” sparked the Justice for LB campaign and the LB Bill, demanding more rights for people with disabilities and their families.

The exhibition, which runs until March at Swansea Museum, is based on oral history testimonies from people who lived in hospitals, their relatives and staff, and is run by and funded by the Heritage Lottery. All the stories from across the region will eventually be deposited in the archive at St Fagan’s, the Museum of Welsh Life.

Phyllis Jones, a patient at Hensol for over 40 years, said of her involvement in the project: “I wanted to tell everyone about Hensol, the good times and bad. They had good staff there but overall I didn’t like living there. I prefer living in my own house”.

Mencap Cymru, which has was involved in helping close many of the area’s hospitals, spent three years researching the project. It wants to record and acknowledge the stories and experiences of former patients and offer people a chance to talk about the past.

Mencap Cymru director Wayne Crocker said of the exhibition: “I very much hope that those who visit will be impressed by the stories they see but more importantly will see the amazing contributions people with a learning disability make to our communities in Wales.”

Anyone recognising the people in the photos or who have stories to tell should contact Mencap Cymru.

You can find out more on Twitter @hiddennowheard or visit the Facebook page.

Community, Health, Poverty, Third sector, Wellbeing

Innovative project redistributes surplus food to needy

December 18, 2014 Saba Salman Leave a comment

Food donated to FoodHub, for distribution to charities and food banks (pic: FoodHub)

Christmas – for some a time of year to overindulge, for others a desperate effort to feed the family.

With a huge rise in the number of people in the UK relying on food banks, a new London project that is making good use of food left behind when people moving house by collecting it and donating it to food banks and charities.

The organisers, a company specialising in overseas moves, explains: “MoveHub and their partners noticed that families were forced to just throw large volumes of food when they moved abroad – due to customs restrictions – and decided that instead, this food should find its way to people who really needed it.”

The project estimates that the food thrown away during moves across the UK could fill 160 supermarket delivery vans each week. While it acknowledges it “can’t reverse food poverty in the UK”, the scheme is an attempt to “contribute to the organisations helping people get back on their feet”.

Among the charities benefitting from FoodHub is homeless charity Centrepoint.

It is estimated that around 3.5m tonnes of food is wasted every year in the UK and this latest drive is a welcome addition to schemes like the “community supermarket” plan, under which unwanted supermarket food is already re-distributed to needy families.

* This is the last Social Issue post for 2014 – the blog will be back in January. Thanks to everyone who has read, shared, contributed to, commented on and got in touch over the last 12 months, your support’s very much appreciated.

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