Week 12: I wrote 11,962 words on Southern Health’s crap communications so you don’t have to #107days

Ally has written a corker of a blog post for Week 12 that needs no more introduction:

Hi everyone! Just to give a bit of background to this blog, I’m Sara’s niece and I’ve just finished my linguistics degree in Leeds. During my final year at university, I had to write an 11,000-word dissertation. Or more specifically, I wrote about the transitivity and non-apologies in the communications from Southern Health to Sara, Monitor and the public, and how these structures were manipulated to assign responsibility for the positive and negative actions detailed in the texts.

The transitivity system deals with where participants are positioned in a sentence, and this can be changed to emphasise or hide these participants. For example, in an ‘active’ sentence like Sara wrote a blog, the ‘actor’ is Sara, and she writes the ‘goal’, which is the blog. Sara is positioned first in the sentence, so she is emphasised. In a ‘passive’ sentence like The blog was written by Sara, the blog is first and Sara is second. This hides Sara’s responsibility for the writing behind the blog itself, so the blog is emphasised. Passive sentences can also appear without an actor, e.g. The blog was written, where nobody is shown to be responsible. Active and passive sentences are very common and don’t always suggest deliberate manipulations of participant responsibility… but often they do, particularly in newspaper reportage.

Non-apologies are especially common in situations where public trust is at stake, such as from institutions and politicians. Non-apologies suggest that they are following social norms and expectations that they will apologise for what is perceived to be some kind of offensive act, but actually avoid performing a proper apology. Non-apologies come in several forms, but in general terms they can suggest that an apology will come or has already come, e.g. I want to apologise, or I have apologised, which doesn’t actually perform the act of apology. Non-apologies can also be selective about what they apologise for, such as I apologise for this distress, but not the act that causes the distress, or I apologise if this caused any confusion which dismisses the idea that anyone should have been confused.

The texts I analysed were the infamous Katrina Percy letter, the follow-up letter from Simon Waugh, the briefing note to Monitor (all on Sara’s blog), and the public statement that was issued after the Verita report was published. From these I chose the statements referring to positive events, such as improvements to services, previous good care etc., and the negative events such as LB’s death and the general failings of the unit.

My analysis compared the frequencies of features across positive and negative statements, including:

• Who was emphasised as being responsible and who was hidden in positive and negative statements
• If the participant responsible was hidden then which participant could be inferred from the surrounding context
• How often participants were shown to be doing actions, and how often actions were done to them
• The non-apology strategies present in the text

I won’t go into huge amounts of detail with the analysis, but there were pretty interesting findings (in my opinion!). In terms of transitivity:

1. Passive sentences (backgrounding responsibility) were more common in statements regarding positive events such as ‘improvements’, and responsibility seemed to be suggested to fall on Southern Health as an organisation.
2. When the responsible participant was removed, the responsibility could almost always be inferred from the surrounding context, and the participant suggested to be responsible was generally Southern Health as a whole in positive statements, but staff at the unit in negative ones. This seemed to create a divide between the ‘good’ organisation and the ‘bad’ staff.
3. Southern Health was most frequently shown to be doing things to something else, such as improvements, whereas staff were always positioned behind something else which backgrounded their involvement in actions.
4. Inanimate nouns such as ‘investigation’ were also often shown to be responsible for actions rather than explicitly naming who was driving these processes, further hiding personal responsibility.
5. Inanimate nouns often ‘helped’ Southern Health in positive events, but ‘revealed’ information to Southern Health in negative events. This frames Southern Health as being dependent on these inanimate nouns, and reduces their responsibility for actions.
6. Staff were often shown to be responsible for ‘failings’, whereas Southern Health was shown to be responsible for a greater variety of actions, again creating a divide between ‘good’ Southern Health and ‘bad’ staff.

The non-apology findings were:

1. 10/14 possible non-apology strategies were present in the texts, often with more than one example of each found.
2. The most common strategy was to use words like ‘incident’ to avoid explicitly stating what the apology was for.
3. The second most common strategy was to express a will to apologise or refer to a past apology.

I only looked at four texts so it’s not really possible to make sweeping statements about Southern Health based on these findings, but in these texts there is evidence suggesting some deliberate manipulation of Southern Health and its staff in assigning blame and taking credit for actions, as well as intentional avoidance of producing an actual apology and risking admitting responsibility for negative actions.

The division between ‘good’ Southern Health and ‘bad’ staff is interesting as it shows a lack of ‘duty of care to staff’, something that they emphasise throughout the communications. The findings also contradict the NHS Being Open policy that is designed to avoid shady communications, which suggests that this kind of communication isn’t widespread across the NHS and that Southern Health needs a reminder.

So, what now? As satisfying as it is to know that I managed to use my degree to give a giant middle finger to Katrina Percy et al, realistically I’m just an undergraduate with a long essay to wave at Southern Health. What would be ace is if someone who could use these findings for positive change (i.e. someone from Southern Health who reads this), actually had the balls to admit that their communications could do with a bit more openness.

Week 12: Sorry seems to be the hardest word #107days

This week, Week 12, we’re focusing on saying sorry. To kick us off a post from Sara sharing her thoughts and experience.

Saying sorry. A fairly straightforward concept with a handy NHS guide for those who might struggle. We’d planned a week on this topic as it’s fundamental to helping families deal with the unexpected and preventable death/serious harm of a family member. A swift, heartful and genuine apology probably is the most valuable tool the NHS has, in terms of heading off lengthy, painful and ultimately costly battles with families. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be widely recognised.

This issue is particularly timely as the template response circulated by some Conservative MPs to constituents’ requests for support for the #LBBill includes a paragraph about Sloven and their unreserved apology for LB’s death. This is lifted from the statement by Katrina Percy, CEO of Sloven, on the day the independent review by Verita was published back in February 2014.

This apology was made seven months after LB died. Up to this point, I [not our family] received a ‘I was deeply saddened and sorry to hear of the death of your son, Connor’ from the Acting Chief Exec on July 11th 2013. An exemplar non apology. Her sadness comes first, followed by ‘sorry to hear’ and then a second line with ‘sincere condolences’ scattered like confetti. These words are words anyone can say to someone who has experienced bereavement. Not the words you say to someone who has died in your care.

Katrina Percy, the actual CEO, popped up in December 2013 ‘offering my personal and sincere condolences on the death of your son, Connor‘.

Again, a non-apology. Offering condolences is not saying sorry. We had to wait until there was evidence that LB shouldn’t have died before something approaching an apology was made, three months later. Sadly, despite this public statement, and an apparent acceptance of the Verita findings, nine months later Sloven stood in front of the coroner, arguing that LB died of natural causes. Maybe the NHS Being Open policy needs a footnote added to remind CEOs to remain consistent to their apologies.

In August 2014 we received a letter from Katrina Percy that is tooth enamel removing in its toxicity. On the subject of apologies, she has this to say:

Like every single organisation and individual in the world, we are not perfect and on a rare number of occasions we get things wrong, sometimes with deeply distressing consequences. On these rare occasions, my role as Leader is to do everything in mine and my organisation’s powerto offer our deep and sincere apologies, to work with everyone concerned – including relatives and regulators – in as positive and productive a way as possible to learn from what went wrong and to put in place arrangements to try to ensure nothing similar happens in future.

In this regard, I believe it was absolutely right for us to offer our profound and public apologies to you for the death in our care of your son, Connor.

Profound, sincere and deep are just words. Meaning remains absent, sadly. And without meaning you really ain’t sorry.

So this week we will be thinking about saying sorry and apologies. Please share any experiences in the comments section or drop us an email. As we say with tedious regularity, this really ain’t rocket science.

Day 107: Honouring LB #107days

Today we come to the end of #107days of action, exactly a year to the day that LB died, whilst in the ‘care’ of Southern Health, an entirely preventable death.

As accidental campaigners we never really could bring ourselves to plan for today, we’ve discussed it often, but nothing felt appropriate. Yesterday we finally settled on today’s action, in keeping with the rest of this entirely crowdsourced campaign, it’s over to you, our amazing, passionate, creative, committed, dedicated network.

We have two options for you today, you’re welcome to do one of them, or both of them (or none of course, it’s really your choice).

Firstly, please leave a comment on this blog post with your ‘take away’ message from #107days; what one memory, or thought, or learning will stick with you. How has LB, and this campaign in his memory, had an impact on you? We’re hoping for lots of comments and you’ll be able to read them as they grow throughout the day. If you’re a blogger and would like to write a post on your own blog please do add a summary, and a link into the comments here. Please remember that comments are moderated, so if your comment doesn’t appear immediately there’s no need to repost it!

Secondly, please change your social media profile pictures to LB for the day. You’re welcome to change it on twitter, or facebook, or tumblr, or instagram, or any combination of the aforementioned sites (and of course any others). We think this collective action will have quite a visual impact, to maximise that please download our profile pic below (right click on the image will allow you to save it to your computer and you can then upload it to twitter) so everyone is using the same black and white pic.

For maximum impact we ask you to only use the picture for the day, we very much hope you’ll join us.

More information on what next for the #JusticeforLB campaign will follow in a couple of weeks. You can follow this blog, or follow us on twitter, or facebook. We will seek your input before we make any decisions, but before we ‘move on’, we’d like to honour LB today.

Thank you all, for your support throughout #107days and today especially.

Day 36: Cry me a river Katrina Percy #107days

Sarah got in touch with us over on facebook when she heard about #JusticeforLB. Sarah is a Canadian blogger, freelance writer and disability advocate who writes the Girl with the Cane blog. She was appalled at what had happened to LB and wanted to ensure that his story was heard on the other side of the atlantic, and so she kindly agreed to write the following blog for #107days, the context you are likely to be familiar with, but her thoughts and reflections are well worth reading:

I’ve recently been made aware of the story in the UK of an autistic young man that’s not getting any press that I’m aware of in the U.S. or Canada. I’d like to tell you about Connor Sparrowhawk’s story.

Connor, known as “Laughing Boy” or LB to his friends and family, was autistic and, from what I can gather, intellectually disabled (it’s difficult to tell when going by British sources sometimes, as they tend to refer to what North Americans call “intellectual disabilities” as “learning disabilities”). He also had epilepsy. In an interview with BBC Radio, LB’s mother, Sara, talks about how when her son turned 18, his normally happy disposition changed:

When he turned 18 in November, his behaviour sort of…he become very unhappy and anxious. And over the space of those 5 or 6 months, he became increasingly sot of unpredictable in his actions and very unlike himself, and he became very difficult for us to manage. We couldn’t get any help to look after him in school, really, and we were struggling to keep him in school.

LB punched a teacher’s assistant and was increasingly unsettled. The family felt that they had no choice but to send him to Slade House, a small treatment and assessment facility (seven beds) run by Southern Health NHS Foundation trust.

Sara talked to the BBC about her hopes the staff at Slade House would be able to figure out what was causing the changes in their son, and that they’d be provided with strategies to manage his anxiety and unhappiness. She feels that Slade House did very little to help either way. But if only that had been the worst of it.

LB was in Slade House for 107 days before he died on July 4, 2013. Sara got the phone call at work from a staff member when LB was on route to the hospital, she told the BBC. He’d been having a bath, and been found unconscious. Sara was told when she reached the hospital that doctors weren’t able to revive him.

The portmortem showed that LB had drowned, likely as a result of having a seizure, and was originally declared a death by natural causes by Southern Health NHS trust. However, an independent report found reasons to conclude otherwise, as indicated in this summary of the report’s findings on bindmans.com:

The report, completed by the independent organisation Verita, investigated LB’s death and found the following:

1. That LB’s death was preventable
2. That there were significant failings in his care and treatment
3. That the failure of staff to respond to and appropriately risk assess LB’s epilepsy led to a series of poor decisions around his care
4. That the level of observations in place at bath time was unsafe and failed to safeguard LB
5. That if a safe observation process had been put in place and LB had been appropriately supervised in the bath, he would not have died on 4 July 2013
6. That the STATT unit lacked effective clinical leadership
7. That there had been no comprehensive care plan in place for the management of LB’s epilepsy and his epilepsy was not considered as part of a risk assessment, in breach of NICE epilepsy guidance

The report follows a highly critical CQC inspection published in December 2013 in which the STATT unit failed on all 10 essential standards of quality and safety. Since that inspection report, the unit has been closed to new admissions.

Wow. Doesn’t seem to me like there’s much for the NHS to do but to try to determine what adequate compensation is in this situation (as if there is such a thing, when the death a loved one is involved), determine who was responsible and to what extent, “clean house” of those who were responsible, and commit to reviewing all the policies and procedures that may have contributed to LB’s death…and actually do so, of course.

But these things rarely happen that simply.

No Justice for LB
There’s not enough space today to get into the ways that justice has been put off for LB and his family, although Sara documents it all very well herself in her blog. Even a small facility like Slade House can be just as destructive as the larger warehouse-like institutions that are falling out of favour; it’s all a matter of attitudes and workplace culture. And like most stories involving professional misconduct in an institutional setting, this one gets uglier the more you find out about it.

I’d like to single out one person in particular.

Katrina Percy, chief executive of the Southern Health NHS Trust, doesn’t see why she should resign over this. After all, she’s apologized. She laments the lack of a “culture where people are able to be open when things don’t go as well as they possibly could.”

Cry me a river, Katrina Percy. That might go over if, after careful preparation and planning, LB had tried to go somewhere independently and gotten on the wrong bus to come home (he apparently loved buses). It doesn’t cut it even remotely when a young man with with multiple disabilities and epilepsy dies in the bathtub after a seizure because a medical unit (which turned out to be unsafe for patients anyway) for which you are ultimately responsible left huge gaps in both his care plan and its policies around observation during bath-time. And you don’t get to slam the family with vague comments about “people” not being “open” because you don’t want to take responsibility for this (or for the other two Southern Health facilities subsequently found to have safety failings after Slade House was investigated).

But then, as Chris Hatton has observed, all’s really not been well at Southern Health for the last while, has it? Quite sketchy indeed, Katrina Percy.

It never should have been acceptable for anything like this to happen, but isn’t this era where families couldn’t trust institutional care to meet the basic safety needs of their loved ones supposed to be over? Aren’t we supposed to know better, and act out of a ethos that demands we treat vulnerable people with dignity, and compassionate, responsible, reliable care?

I’m thinking about all the places that I’ve covered in this blog where people got hurt or died because disabled people were considered expendable and just given the absolute minimum of care. The abuses at Huronia Regional Health Centre in Ontario, Canada, happened a long time ago…Willowbrook State school in Long Island been closed for decades…but the abuse at Winterbourne View is still quite fresh in the UK’s memory, the New York State group home abuse scandal broke soon after I started this blog in 2011, and the men profiled in the New York Time’s recent “The Boys in the Bunkhouse” piece were only removed in 2009 from a horribly abuse group home/sheltered workshop situation that went on for decades.

This must stop.

The next time someone tells you that disabled people aren’t at risk in our society, point them to this video, and ask them what they think it would feel like to have a seizure in bathtub full of water and not be able to call out for help.

I know that it’s something that I don’t want to think about.

Sarah drafted this post a month ago and has been (patiently) waiting for a #107days slot – what can I say, you’re all amazing and keen to get involved.

Since then her thoughts have become even more topical in light of Katrina Percy’s ‘performance’ at the Oxfordshire Learning Disability Partnership Board, see Gail’s brilliant blog posts on this meeting Dinosaurs and Elephants in the Room and How things could have been…and the float that sank.

Then yesterday KP faced more media attention after yet another critical report and a warning notice from CQC, and Monitor announcing they are taking enforcement action against Southern Health. You can read Sara’s latest post, Love tennis in health (and social care) towers, for her thoughts on this latest development.

To repeat Sarah’s catchphrase Cry me a river Katrina Percy, it’s time to do the decent thing.