George Julian has taken on the grim task of working her way through responses to Freedom of Information requests she sent to every Integrated Care Board (ICB) in England. [The words ‘integrated care board’ ratchet up my snooze button so I’m trying to stay jiggy writing this, not succumb to the malaise and weariness these terms generate.] George asked them for their latest Leder data and publication plans for their next reports. She was trying to find out the state of play with the data that has been collected by each ICB since the data included in the latest (2023) Leder report (published in Sept). Each ICB feeds its data/reports to the mothership now based at Imperial College under the quiet (silent even) steer of Prof Strydom.

[I took a trip down blog memory lane and found this post about the 2017 Leder review, also published late and covered up. There is form here. Depressing to note the publication of the review generated live national news coverage then. Now it’s as if someone has left the report on the returned book shelves at an unmarked local library.]

So what can we conclude from the ICB responses to the Leder process?

1. Rumours of changes to the Leder programme.
2. No dosh to do the work effectively and an associated lack of staff with dedicated time.
3. Problems with systems, accessing and uploading data. Outages and smoutages.
4. ICB restructuring has worsened the process. [There’s always a restructure to be had].
5. Delay, delay, excuses, excuses and a further muddying of report years and deaths reported.

It’s fair to say the Leder process has erased any consideration of the people who died. It’s a clunky, dilapidated conveyor belt of ‘notifications in’, ‘complete reviews’ out and a growing number of unfinished reviews. A dogs dinner. A flawed process which has descended into farce. Hints and whispers of ‘this process is shite’, ‘who cares’, and ‘I don’t want to do this’ foot stamping.

And then chillingly Dorset report: “Approximately 90% of all reviews have identified little or no significant learning in the last year, which raises the question of the value of completing a review for every case.”

Get that sledgehammer out Dorset and smash the remaining bits of humanity, respect and reason for trying to learn from the premature and often avoidable deaths of people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people.

There’s no new learning, people are gonna die cos we ain’t changing shite so let’s just stop reviewing every death.

And there I was, literally a month ago, publishing a book about the social murder of people with learning disabilities.