Mental Health Act Reforms, Transforming Care & PBS: A Holy Trinity or Diabolical Triumvirate?

Mental Health Act Reforms, Transforming Care & PBS: A Holy Trinity or Diabolical Triumvirate?

This lecture will take place on campus, in 003, ground floor Business and Law Building, City Campus East (full address at the bottom of the page). The lecture will also be available to stream online - please register for the event and a link will be sent to you to access the live stream.

The Building the Right Support national plan was published in October 2015 in the wake of the Winterbourne View scandal in 2011 which involved the systematic abuse of people with intellectual disabilities in an independent sector hospital in Bristol, England. The plan, via the Transforming Care programme, included the closure of between 35-50% hospital beds for people with intellectual disabilities and/or autism by the end of March 2019. The programme fell well short of this target.

More recently, the UK Government published a White Paper that aims to reform the Mental Health Act in England and Wales. One significant proposal is to remove intellectual disability and autism from the scope of the legislation in all but a limited number of circumstances. In part this is aimed at reducing reliance on specialist inpatient services for people with intellectual disabilities and autism.

The basis of the Transforming Care programme and the proposed legislative changes are not clear.

This presentation considers the failure of the Transforming Care programme, the implications of the proposed mental health legislation changes for people with intellectual disabilities, and identifies a clash of clinical models at the heart of the debate.

About the Speaker

John L Taylor is a Professor in the Faculty of Business & Law and Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. He is also a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Approved Clinician with Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust.

Professor Taylor is Chair of the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Mental Health Act Advisory Group and Approved Clinician Peer-Review Panel, a Past President of the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP), and a former Chair of the BPS Faculty for Forensic Clinical Psychology. He was a member of the UK Government’s Mental Health Act (MHA) Independent Review Advisory Group. Professor Taylor has published more than 150 research papers, articles, books and book chapters mainly concerning the mental health and forensic needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Professor Taylor received an award for Outstanding Contribution to Applied Practice from the BPS Faculty for Forensic Clinical Psychology in 2017 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the BABCP in 2018 for his work on developing CBT for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

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