YH families Law Commission DoLS consultation feedback

Overall we welcome the consultation and proposed changes. However

from our experience as family carers we know that the implementation
in practice will be the key issue. This was a theme throughout our
discussion as well as issues of how families are perceived by some
professionals. (There was an interesting discussion about how
professionals in all settings may not want to take advice from family
carers or more experienced practitioners for a variety of reasons
perhaps connected to their own family/life stage). We all had evidence
and personal experience of when knowledge, expertise and ways of
supporting an individual developed over time by families and others are
not valued, or even ignored. We were reminded of the Justice for LB,
Nico and Thomas campaigns and the issues they have highlighted. We
feel there is a need for training for staff in understanding and working
with family members in all situations, backed by strong guidance.
We think the language and concepts within Protective Care are really
helpful much easier for staff, families and people generally to
understand. Therefore we hope this framework will be easier to
implement.
We think there is potential for the distinction between supportive care
and restrictive care and treatment to help promote the choice vs duty
of care distinction. As family members we are often frustrated to be told
by support workers or their organisations that our family member has
made a choice that we question their understanding of the
consequences of (or the work done to help them think that through) we
hope that supportive care raising the issues of mental capacity and
decision making might help drive improvement in practice.
We did not have time to read the full document in detail but we could not
see detail on how you propose the advocate role fits with the guidance
on the Care Act advocate role. We consider the practice and the
principles of that section of the Care Act are far from embedded as yet in
our experience. We would support the appropriate person being a family
member or circle of support and would welcome individuals having an
independent advocate too as family members may often welcome
support in this role, especially in light of issues mentioned above. We
think it critical that the appropriate person role should be developed and
the guidance strongly support them working with peoples family / circles
of support or citizen advocate.

We would promote a stipulation that when a restrictive care or treatment

situation is needed that where at all possible the systems and support
principles from the family are utilised until that new setting knows the
person better and can make a judgement. We know of many examples
where families expertise is ignored to the detriment of their family
member.
We recognised that a lot of supported living would classify as restrictive
care and that we need easy guidance for staff and families to
understand what restrictive means in those situations.
We talked about how this process might be used to prevent entrance to
Assessment and treatment Units by helping to develop a good process
for agreeing the level of restriction needed rather than avoiding that or
going to extremes.
We want to define regular in terms of review meetings to have a
framework of timescales to be implemented to meet individual needs
We welcome the concept of an approved practitioner and would like
training and guidance for those roles about working in partnership with
families particularly about taking a respectful approach to challenging
opinions that the practitioners disagree with.
We would like some clarity about the some situations where this applies
in family homes and what safeguards will be put in place to preserve
ordinary family life and cultural variations to normal.