A student, Andrew, came round on Saturday. From Yorkshire. He’s doing a pre-university diploma in media and is making a short film about what happened to LB for his coursework and to raise awareness among the students at his college. He was sensitive, quiet, thoughtful and careful in setting up his equipment. In conducting the interview. It couldn’t have been an easy task.
Yesterday Liz (who brilliantly maintains a spreadsheet logging all mention of LB and #JusticeforLB, together with easy read/more accessible versions) noticed that the (approved) CQC November board minutes reported that LB died through misadventure. The CQC Trustee she raised this with immediately apologised and said he would make sure the minutes were corrected. (The full jury findings can be read here… [Howl]).
Sloven, as regular blog followers will know, recorded LB’s death as natural causes in their board minutes a few weeks after his death. Minutes that have never been corrected.
Maybe some people reading this will be thinking
Bloody hells bells. Give it a rest, you lot. Banging on about tiny details. Christ. We’ve enough on our plates, trying to do our jobs with less and less dosh. More and more figures to produce, boxes to tick, vanguard type activity to bufferoo. Jeez…
But this stuff is important. It’s deeply important to us how LB’s death is reported/recorded officially. To state he died naturally, or through risks he took voluntarily, is wrong. But it’s of importance, or should be, to all of us. The minuting and approval of inaccuracies by public bodies raises various overlapping questions/concerns.
Most obviously, how? How can such inaccuracies be noted, written, approved and published? Is the detail so inconsequential? Is the process of interminable meetings and equally interminable minutes a hollow, meaningless process? How many people – in the official chain of leading, acting, communicating and doing – are simply slumbering on the job?
Why are the minutes inaccurate? Are they typically riddled with inaccuracies or are these inaccuracies related to particular assumptions/prejudices? The old learning disability goggles filtering out anything to do with certain people as irrelevant. Un-noteworthy. The Mazars review found hundreds of deaths similarly discounted, ignored, brushed aside.
The response to the Mazars review – eh? The what? M? Mazzwot? – further illustrates and underlines this inertia, this disinterest. The lack of care, concern and disregard. Why bother to keep accurate minutes when an independent review of your practices revealing deep rooted failures at board level is brushed aside? There are no consequences.
And what does all this say about the regulatory processes/bods that flit, fancy and dance around NHS Trusts? Clearly knowing they’ve sort of got power that they ain’t ever going to use? A grotesque kind of playground hopscotch where everyone is simultaneously covering their eyes, pocketing the best stones, rubbing the chalk lines away and guffawing over what a great playtime it was in the kids toilets and staff room. Going home to reconstruct the, at best, deep slumber or unsavoury practices they generate, indulge or witness to their loved ones and friends.
Slumbering continues possibly because most people aren’t rendered invisible. And couldn’t imagine being imprisoned in a room, fed through a perspex hatch for nine years, at a cost of £12,600 a week, without the weight of the state sweeping in with the justice batten. They couldn’t imagine having one of their kids drown in a hospital bath. Or locked up for 10 years for no crime other than a lack of appropriate support in the community. But the continued silence around these atrocities is… what? I’m almost out of words.
mydaftlife 