Minister orders new checks on private care homes after regulator failed to act on abuse

The UK government has ordered an urgent review of private hospitals caring for adults with learning disabilities and four care workers have been arrested after an undercover TV programme exposed abuse described by a clinical psychologist as “torture.”

Three men and a woman working at Winterbourne View in Bristol were arrested and bailed by police after a reporter for the BBC Panorama programme secretly filmed workers over a four week period slapping and kicking residents, taunting them, pinning them under chairs, and drenching them with cold water.

Care services minister Paul Burstow announced that the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which regulates the sector, would carry out a series of random, unannounced inspections into a sample of units caring for people with learning disabilities.

The CQC apologised for failing to act on concerns about Winterbourne View brought to it by a senior nurse at the unit. It acknowledged that “there were indications of problems at this hospital, which should have led us to taking action sooner” and launched an internal review of its actions and a review of all the services provided by Castlebeck, the private provider which runs the unit.

Castlebeck suspended 13 members of staff and apologised unreservedly to the patients and their families. One of the biggest care providers in the UK, it was being paid £3500 (€3950; $5700) per patient a week from public funds.

The CQC said it had been contacted by the whistleblower on 6 December, having already been alerted by the local authority, which had set up a safeguarding meeting to discuss the issues. It thought the problem was being tackled but “for various reasons” the safeguarding meeting did not take place until February.

The regulator accepted that had it contacted the whistleblower directly after receiving his email, it “would have been alerted to the seriousness of the situation and moved swiftly to inspect the hospital.” The BBC reporter, who was taken on as a care worker, carried out the secret filming during February and March.

The hospital is meant to be an assessment unit for adults with profound learning disabilities or autism rather than a long stay hospital, but most of the patients have lived there for more than a year.

In one scene in the programme, a female patient is shown pinned underneath a chair for more than 30 minutes with one staff member sitting in the chair and keeping his foot on her wrist, while a second worker kneels on her legs. In another an employee is seen acting as a Nazi camp commandant, slapping a patient across the face with leather gloves, saying: “Nein, nein, nein.”

In a letter to the Financial Times published on 1 June, the CQC’s chief executive, Cynthia Bower, said the number of inspections had dropped temporarily while the commission was engaged in the “enormous task” of registering care providers under the new regulatory system required by the Health and Social Care Act 2008.