Community Living Failures.
I recently read an interesting paper that was recommended to me about the
re-institutionalisation of people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people.
Read it here.
Essential talks about the growth of secure placements, often in the private sector, for people who have not thrived in community settings and are seen as ‘too difficult’.
I personally know several young people for whom this is the reality.
Repeated community placements have failed; different care providers, different settings and different funding packages have all been tried and failed.
Some of these attempts were, to be honest, doomed to fail despite the very best efforts of everyone involved.
But this could have been identified at the beginning and the person saved from yet another difficult experience.
There are two main thoughts for further discussion in future blogs:
I have designed a Community Placement analysis tool that can help service planning and identify the ‘deal breakers’ which can indicate the likelihood of success.
We need to redefine what we mean by ‘community’. Someone who challenges traditional community placements is communicating, very clearly, that their community and their preferred lifestyle is not what is being offered.
Watch Ben Fogle’s ‘Lives in the Wild’ and you see that for some people their ideal lifestyle is very different from what most would choose.
Do we ever give people who find our typical community lifestyle difficult the choice to lead a very alternative existence?
What do you think about this? Let me know here.