The Society for Children
and Adults with Learning
Disabilities and their Families
Supporting Campaigns
Lobbying MPs, ministers & agencies on legislation and policy changes
Helpline: 0161 474 7323
Here to help with questions relating to learning disability and its impact on family carers
Membership
How to join us…
Membership of Rescare is available to individuals, families, and affiliated groups (charities, schools, etc.). Your membership of Rescare helps us to campaign on your behalf; to represent the interests of people with learning disabilities, their carers, and especially family carers.
Rescare has always tried to present the views and interests of its members in consultations undertaken by government departments (e.g. the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Justice) and by bodies such as the Law Commission – and we continue to do so. We were closely involved in consultations prior to the publication of the Valuing People White Paper and the passing of Mental Capacity Act, and we take a special interest in the operation of the Office of the Public Guardian and the Court of Protection.
Members are entitled to contact our Helpline for advice and information.
Members receive a quarterly newsletter, Resnews, which aims to keep them up to date with issues in the learning disability sector, and with Rescare’s activities.
We have created an area of our website with access reserved for members. Details available here. This is being used initially to make back-issues of Resnews available as PDF documents.
We do not operate a forum, but we do encourage members to send us their views on issues related to learning disability (by post or email); we will consider publishing any submission online on our ‘Editorial and Letters‘ webpage, or in Resnews.
If you are interested in becoming a member, please
- phone us on 0161 4747323, or
- email us at office@rescare.org.uk , or
- complete the online contact form (see our Contact page), or
- or download and send in the membership application form, available here for download in Word or PDF format.
(Membership currently costs £15 per year for Individual Membership and £20 for Family Membership).
Rescare on Facebook
Close these units now. Support for families needs to be there from diagnosis onward to ensure crises do not occur. Care should be local and supportive of family rights. Seven years on from Winterbourne View, why has nothing changed? | Saba Salman ShamefulA SHOCKING RECORD OF FAILURE Camphill Village Communities must not be destroyed Camphill Village Communities must not be destroyed
The abuse of people with autism and learning disabilities filmed secretly by Panorama at an NHS-funded, privately-run hospital just 8 years after Winterbourne suggests that not much has changed. The government has failed miserably in it's stated aim to implement the key recommendations in Lord Bubb's report that these institutions - prisons in all but name where people are kept in solitary - are shut down. This is not an isolated slip-up. The staff ( or many) at this hospital, now suspended, were thugs who, like warders in Victorian asylums like Bedlam, taunted, abused and insulted residents. One woman is seen screaming at a resident that her family are " f****** poison" They should, like their predecessors at Winterboune face custodial sentences. But they were enabled. Failed by a company that employs low-paid, low-skiled workers manifestly unfit to look after extremely vulnerable people. Failed by the CQC, increasingly unfit for purpose, that failed to pick up on what was going on and awarding the provider a 'Good' rating on its last inspection. It’s time the CQC was broken up. It’s too big, too bureaucratic and all-too-often looks in the wrong places. And failed by successive administrations that have not grasped the simple distinction that mental health and learning disabilities are two different conditions that require a different approach. It's time those MPs who take an interest in this forgotten section of citizens woke up to the fact that we have a rotten system built on a shaky foundation and a flawed premise. And that it needs root and branch reform. Watch the programme: bbc.in/2YLwNvz
Alain Catzeflis
Alliance for Camphill
The Society for Children and Adults
with Learning Disabilities and their Families