My hon. Friend makes a very valid point. Everybody here this afternoon could not fail to be shocked and horrified by the case outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) regarding her young constituent, Matthew, and the quality of care that he received on an in-patient unit.
Some 1,311 cases were passed for review between July 2016 and November 2017, but only 103—that is 8%—have finished so far. The report cited a lack of local capacity to review cases, inadequate training for people completing mortality reviews and insufficient staff capacity to complete a mortality review. Will the Minister update the House on when the remaining cases will be finalised and what the Department is doing to ensure that these barriers are tackled? In 13% of cases reviewed, the person’s health had been adversely affected by delays in care or treatment, gaps in service provision, organisational dysfunction, neglect or abuse.
Just how many more deaths must occur before the Government tackle the unjust treatment of people with learning disabilities? Dr Ryan, Connor Sparrowhawk’s mother, was also damning in her assessment. She said that too many agencies had shown “systematic disregard” for some people with learning disabilities and she felt that certain people “simply don’t count” in the eyes of
the authorities. We must do better, and we must show that every single life matters. But our fear is that, without some fundamental changes in the Government’s approach, the problem is set to get worse, not better.
Take the NHS workforce, for example. The latest figures from Health Education England show that the number of learning disability nurses working in the NHS has gone down by a third over five years. HEE data from March 2017 shows that learning disability nursing had the highest proportion of vacancies, at 16.3%, compared with all other fields of nursing. Will the Minister tell us how the Government plan to tackle this?
It is bad enough that the failures of transforming care have left too many people inappropriately in hospital settings, but the lack of trained staff when they are there makes that failure all the more stark.