It’s late. Probably too late to write this. Rich has gone to bed. After an evening of recounting, revisiting and rehashing the same stuff we’ve now been talking/howling/raging and weeping about for eight months. We talk at home, at bus stops, in the supermarket. The most extreme stuff imaginable. In London yesterday, Rich said to someone in a cafe who asked what he was doing that day ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you’.

Extreme spaces and extreme non engagement.

LB, a fit and healthy, quirky, remarkable, self assured and beyond loved 18 year old entered an NHS hospital nearly a year ago now and died. Through proven neglect. This isn’t ‘news’. This isn’t well known (well outside of a grassroots campaign, #justiceforLB, that deserves a spotlight of its own). We’ve endured brutalisation through the actions of the “Trust” (Sloven) and, as the meeting today with NHS England staff demonstrated, a broader carelessness, disregard and disrespect. A simply ‘doesn’t matter’ attitude.

If LB hadn’t been learning disabled, his death would have provoked instantaneous outrage and engagement. We’ve lost count of how many ‘atrocity stories’ since LB died that have been headline news. We’ve fought like fucking billy-o to get accountability. We managed to get an independent investigation into his death commissioned and, with a fight, published. A report that categorically states that LB should not have died.

LB should not have drowned in a bath in a hospital. In a unit with four ‘specialist’ staff and five patients. He was diagnosed with epilepsy. He had documented increasing seizure activity as a consequence of the medication change imposed by the clinician responsible for him. It was recorded that he was sensitive to medication change. We told them he was having seizures when he was in there. Knowledge they chose to dispute.

Why would you dispute seizure activity in someone diagnosed with epilepsy, sensitive to medication change, when their family flag up seizure activity? Where in the the fucking curriculum/on the job experience does stamping out any sniff of a known risk feature?

And yet, the CEO of this shoddy, beyond unfit for purpose outfit, was interviewed on local radio a week or so ago, bleating about the ‘false positives’ that led to another CQC inspection fail. Those pesky selective false positives that led her, and her board, to assume they were providing adequate (we ain’t even reaching for good here) care? Sheesh. What is a Chief Exec and her board to do in the face of such insouciant staff actions?

Yowsers. This is horrendous. At the very least the relevant bodies must have collectively swooped in and sorted things out. A young man drowning in the bath in a specialist unit? Blimey. At least they must have supported the family in every way possible. The various bodies must have chucked in everything possible to ease the intense pain this family have experienced.

Yeah.

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