Summary of outcomes from focussed visits 2010-11
Between April 2010 and March 2011, The Commission undertook 87 focussed visits to people receiving care for mental health problems or learning disability. We visited these people in various settings, including hospitals, care homes and prisons. We made 301 recommendations for improvement following these visits. When we followed these up, we found that services had taken satisfactory action in 76% of cases.
In this paper, we report on the main themes and outcomes from 74 of those visits. These were to people receiving treatment in the following types of care settings:
- Intensive psychiatric care and secure units
- Care facilities for people with learning disability
- Older people in hospital
- Older people in care homes
- People with mental disorders in prison
- Young people's care facilities
- Mental health continuing care and rehabilitation facilities
- Adult acute admission wards
Click on the links to the left to view the themes and outcomes for each setting.
There were 13 other visits that did not fall into these categories.
We have examined the main issues to emerge from these visits. We have given specific examples of improvements that services made after our visits. It was heartening to see that service managers paid great attention to our recommendations and acted on them.
Many of our recommendations addressed principles of Scottish mental health and incapacity legislation, the articles of human rights legislation and other important international conventions. We wanted to ensure that services were taking account of these when providing care and treatment. There are many examples in our reports of issues we raised. The most common were:
- Care environments that did not appear to meet people's right to privacy and dignity (article 8 of the European Convention for Human Rights)
- Care plans that did not appear to comply with the principles of maximum benefit, participation and the range of options available
- Lack of attention to physical health, contrary to the right to the highest attainable standard of health (article 25 of the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with disability)
The sections on the left give more detail on the recommendations we made in each type of care setting or alternatively, click below to download the whole report as a pdf.
