I am absolutely delighted that we’re going to be forming a partnership between Southern Health and Ridgeway. I believe our combined effort is really going to provide superb world class services for people with a learning disability across the whole of the area we cover.

Katrina Percy, Sloven CEO, March 2012 

What Katrina Percy forgot to add to this ‘welcome to my empire’ speech was… and if we cock it up, we’ll flog the Slade House site and other Oxfordshire land for a massive profit and buggar off back down south.

Yep. For some reason [piss up/brewery/Oxfordshire County Council?] there was no penalty type clause in the contract awarding the tender to Sloven. Gifting them land and property worth millions. Rumour is the Slade House site will be used to develop student accommodation.

Astonishing.

Andrew Smith, our bloody brilliant MP, and our equally fab local BBC Oxford news team are all over this. As Andrew Smith said in an interview last week; “This is unacceptable to the public, unacceptable to LB’s family and unacceptable to me. I will fight it.” Good.

Sloven – any thought of providing ‘superb world class services’ for learning disabled people long gone – issued a statement saying ‘We are carefully considering our options. No decision has been made’. ££££££Kerching££££££££. The Department of Health issued a statement saying something like “er, none of our business, piss off and sort out your mess locally.” A teensy bit shortsighted really.

Hmmm.

If Sloven think they are going to profit from LB’s death and parasite this money out of the county, their reputation management indicators will be flashing London bus red for some time. As simple as. It’s just wrong.

Of course they may do the right thing without a fight. That would be priceless.

LB’s buses at the end of yesterday

Wondering what we can do really. In a bit of a despondent way. The update I posted this week illustrates how public bodies can simply delay. With seemingly unlimited doses of delay powder. A sort of modern wday ‘smoking out’ policy. Earlier today I found out that Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) are delaying their response to my Freedom of Information request about their ‘investigation’ because a Public Interest Test is being carried out.

I don’t know what this means and the FOI dept at OCC were unable to enlighten me beyond the fact it will involve a delay of up to 20 working days. Another month potentially. It would be bloody brilliant if they could soup it up a bit and complete this test (test?) in days rather than weeks but given the weighty blanket of on going delay, I’m not going to anticipate anything. July 22 is the new date.

I don’t have a bar anymore. That was crushed somewhere along the way. When we realised that these public bodies can do whatever they want to devastated parents/families and no one will stop them. I now expect the worse and, so far, that has been spot on.

Another parent, Nic, whose child died a few months before LB posted this on my blog yesterday.

Nic regularly posted comments in support, in shared grief, rage and despair at the impossibility of trying to get accountability, justice or anything to make sense of the apparently casual and brutal chucking aside of much loved children’s lives. One of the first comments she made included the request ‘More photos please’.

So here’s another pic from that holiday in 2010. When we were walking a completely different path. And, on a more cheery note, the #JusticeforLB flag is returning to Glastonbury this year with the legendary Lawthom Goodley crew. Bloody good timing in the circumstances.

Just under two days in Tromso this week. Midnight sun land. Well not much sun but spectacular sights. And so much daylight. Which was strangely mesmerising. I learned a lot from colleagues about life in northern Norway. Including snow management techniques. The importance of building capacity to allow space for snow. Built on an understanding that the snow ain’t going anywhere fast and everyday life needs to continue.

Sloven and OCC don’t seem to understand the need for this space when it comes to grief and families. Instead they just shovel, or try to. A process that’s destructive, counter-productive and hugely damaging.

There are policies that try to create space for grief within the NHS. The sensible and straightforward Being Open framework, for example. But policies are just words if they’re ignored. As meaningless as the non-apologies identified by Ally, LB’s cousin, in her recent dissertation on Sloven communications.

There are obvious differences between heavy and sustained snowfall and grief. But I find it hard to understand how the grief stuff, something so agonisingly accessible – most people can, if they can bear to go there, have the beginnings of imagining what such grief feels like – is dismissed or ignored. Intensely human, deeply emotional and gut wrenchingly awful experience is trampled over, ignored or worse, by the public bodies responsible.

How do we get it so blinking wrong?

I came across Sloven’s 2013/4 Annual Report today in which they make the extraordinary claim that they are 100% compliant with Duty of Candour obligations (p121).

100% compliance? Eh? How can claiming LB died from natural causes in July 13, failing to disclose his full medical records until November 14 (via the coroner), accepting that his death was preventable in February 14 and then claiming again he died through natural causes in November 15, fit with duty of candour compliance? How can not sharing how Nico Reed died with his family for nearly two years be candour compliant? Or do learning disability related incidents stand outside this indicator?

Up until the last couple of months, I’d probably have written to the Board chair asking for some clarification on this. Not any more. The OCC report (OCCRAP) and their response to my obvious and fully justified distress about this report, on top of the various brain melt communications we’ve had with the now ex-Sloven Board chair/still-in-post CEO documented on these pages, have demonstrated that they have the power to do what they want. Including telling the most fanciful of lies and sticking them.

It’s simply one fucked up, archaic and sometimes corrupt system.

This afternoon, stuck on the Oxford Tube coming out of London, I was reading negative academic related stuff on my twitter timeline. Then my niece forwarded her undergraduate dissertation. She’s just completed a degree in linguistics at Leeds. For her dissertation she did a critical discourse analysis of four documents; Sloven’s public statement on the publication of the Verita report, their briefing document to Monitor, and letters from the CEO and Board Chair to us.

I still don’t fully understand what transitivity is but non-apologies are pretty straightforward. In a kind of a random shambles; human, mother, (proud) aunt, campaigner, academic, raging woman, Oxford Tube captive and probably other identities, I read this dissertation. Between Hillingdon and Lewknor.

I was struck, in particular, by three things. First, it’s an example of an undergraduate dissertation that’s robust, rigorous, relevant and political. I’m impressed by both Ally’s work/focus and the encouragement and support she was obviously given by Leeds.

Second, (and I won’t say much about the content right now) the conclusions are clear, carefully evidenced and show that Sloven (and probably other NHS Foundation Trusts/local authorities) don’t operate anything approaching a whiff of candour, openness and transparency.

Third, if an undergraduate student can produce a clear, critical and well evidenced piece of research demonstrating this, why is so much meaningless talk still being talked?

Found out today that the investigation into the actions of the unit staff member we referred to their disciplinary council in May 2014 is further delayed because new information* has emerged that will feed into this investigation. Wow. Every aspect of trying get accountability for what happened to LB has been delayed. Interminably.

The two forces of darkness, as I now see Sloven and OCC, are key delay players. Sloven explicitly, through non disclosure of documents, sitting on reports and generally being obstructive. OCC are slightly less obvious but do a cracking number in delay on the quiet. We now have to wait while their ‘independent’ consultant goes through the issues we raised about the ‘independent investigation’ they conducted into LB’s death without informing us. [For the ease of clarity here, I’ll call this report OCCRAP]. Apparently he’ll do this sometime next month.

[NB: In the delay game, there are no deadlines. Just vagueness. The only deadline so far is LB. And he had no say in that. Everyone (other than families) has  flexibility and resources to do what they want. Without remorse, reflection or hint of humanity].

The coroner sensibly said he wouldn’t read OCCRAP until it had been revised. Verita read it and are waiting to hear OCCs response to our response. Their report, (Verita (2) [sorry], has a delayed publication date which is now expected sometime in the next month or so. [Verita (2) officially started September 2014 for six months].

Our response to OCCRAP was, and remains; ‘Bin the fucker. Pile of toxic shite’. But this response is discounted. We have no power (underlined by the absence of challenge from those who could). So we were forced (bullied) into examining OCCRAP line by line and documenting inaccuracies. A process of phenomenal wastefulness, inefficiency and unspeakable distress.

We’re left wondering when did reputation (and vested interest) became the overriding consideration of ‘public’ bodies?

And how can so many in influential positions sleep so apparently contentedly through this? *Thank you to the person/s who came forward with this information.