A botched safeguarding enquiry into similar injuries sustained by two learning-disabled men made it impossible to clearly establish their causes, a scathing report has found.
The safeguarding adults review (SAR), published this week by West Sussex Safeguarding Adults Board, identified a series of errors in agencies’ responses to broken legs suffered by Matthew Bates and Gary Lewis within a 24-hour period at the same care home.
Incidents at the home run by a West Sussex firm at centre of deaths investigation would have sparked 'different response' had children been involved, the review concludes.
The two men, both residents of Beech Lodge, near Horsham in West Sussex, were hospitalised with femur fractures during the morning of 1 April 2015.
Sussex Health Care, the company that runs Beech Lodge, has since become the subject of separate ongoing investigations by the police and Care Quality Commission into a number of reported deaths at its homes.
The SAR found that poor handling of the initial safeguarding process led to a confused and ineffective enquiry into Bates and Lewis’s injuries.
The police were involved too late, it found, while allowing Sussex Health
Care to take a lead role into determining events at one of its homes undermined the investigation’s credibility. Suspicions voiced by Bates and Lewis’s families, around collusion between agencies, had been left “difficult if not impossible to rebut”, the review said.
The report’s author, retired police superintendent Brian Boxall, said he had “no doubt” that the matter would have been handled differently had children been involved.
“This case demonstrates how the approach to injuries inflicted on vulnerable adults still has a different, more cautious approach, leaving adults at risk,” the report concluded.
For more information see Safeguarding adults review slams ‘confused’ enquiry into learning-disabled men’s injuries available @ www.communitycare.co.uk