Had a day off today and had a lovely lunch with lil sis, Sam. Once she’d gone, the latest FOI pinged into my inbox. More stuff from the County Council about STATT. This includes a second (in addition to the November 2012 quality review) Quality and Safety Assurance Review of the Oxfordshire Learning Disability NHS Trust (OLDT), just before the Sloven takeover, commissioned in September 2012 by NHS South of England. Conducted by an external consultancy.

The review states that the impending acquisition, issues arising from Winterbourne View and those relating to an inpatient client led to a renewed intensity of interest and scrutiny on OLDT by the Strategic Health Authority. It discovered an insular organisation, with high levels of restraint, a culture in which a casualness ‘about strict process’ had been allowed, variable (even ‘dysfunctional’) relationships with commissioners and a complacency of attitude that was characterised as a lack of awareness and transparency. The review concludes that the culture can ‘best be characterised as a combination of defensiveness and complacency in respect of quality, safety and risk‘.

It recommends that Sloven swiftly act to ask the right questions of senior managers and ‘gain more robust assurance about incidents, actions and outcomes’. It also recommends that Sloven review staff training requirements and work to reduce restraint use.

Nearly 11 months before LB died. Everything that needed to be known about STATT was known. Documented, stamped and signed. A legitimated torture chamber. Post Winterbourne View.

We, knowing none of this, drove our beautiful and beyond loved boy, a couple of miles along the Slade, that cold, dark March evening. To his death. A death that could not have been more clearly written on the walls of Sloven Health and others.

You absolute bunch of fucking bastards.