Hello, its the end of a long week but I was having a conversation this week with Gillian on twitter and said that I felt that the Learning Disability Mortality Review process, LEDER, was confusing things when it came to the deaths of learning disabled people rather than helping necessarily. She was interested in my thoughts and its easier to record a video than it is to write a blog post, and I’ve written several blog posts before about what I think is wrong with LEDER, so twitter allows me 2 minutes of video, so this is my critique of LEDER in 2 minutes I suppose.
The first thing that is wrong with it is the acronym. I don’t understand it. What is the L – E – D – E – R, uppercase, lowercase, it doesn’t make sense. The programme is called the Learning Disability Mortality Review Programme so where does the acronym LEDER come from, its confusing, and distracting.
The second thing is that LEDER is considered to be a learning review process, and not an investigative process, which is a total missed opportunity from my perspective. It’s a bit of a shit sandwich, they do what’s bad with care, whats really good and wonderful about the care provided to a person, even when very little has been. I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think its helpful actually.
And the second thing [which obviously is the third thing but my brain had packed up for the week already] is that its not mandatory. It’s not mandatory to report a death to LEDER and the LEDER review process is not timely, they’ve missed all their targets. It’s not particularly accurate, I’ve seen many reports with inaccuracies of basic facts including typos, and wrong dates of death, and wrong spellings of names.
So I think it’s a case of performative scrutiny, where we want to be seen to be doing something and undertaking actions, as opposed to actually applying any meaningful scrutiny into the deaths of learning disabled people.
I don’t understand how hundreds of reviews summarising information but not actually interrogating the evidence, is adding anything really. I think it’s just a distraction, I think it’s there to show that we have responded, as opposed to really learn, or find out anything.
So that’s my concerns. Umm, I’ve got many, many more but I’ve got to keep it short. I’d be interested in your thoughts on LEDER.
Do we really need to keep having learning reviews around how disabled, learning disabled people are dying? Or could we just accept that we know now, and we’ve known for decades, and can we just move on to actually doing something about it?
Thanks, bye bye.