Community care without controls can be lethal if no one is watching the watchers. In this case, while a child was supposed to be visited two times a week and her care monitored, those visits did not happen. No one monitored and a child died. Danieal Kelly, like Haleigh Poutre, was failed by the systems in place to “protect”.
An eleven year prison term won’t bring this child back to life and in a residential setting, many eyes and many hands would have been involved. I believe this 14 year old with cerebral palsy would still be alive in a residential setting where many shifts and pairs of eyes, and specialized services were available.
Sometimes I wonder if the income streams generated by foster kids who receive SSDI and the money goes to agencies, or helpless kids like Kelly, the 14 year old who died in so-called community care, are not too tempting without serious checks and balances and auditing oversight.
There is a place for “community care”; there is also a place for specialized residential care. Both are needed by some individuals, and both require real over sight to be safe and effective.
Humility is teachability. “Teachability” includes the ability to move beyond doctrine, to admit one size does not fit all, and to even be able to admit to being wrong and on occassion to say “I am sorry.”
A governmental agency or system that is not teachable, and which cannot admit mistakes and change when change is needed will kill some of those it serves.
And amen Sister Amberpaw. (can I get an amen?) Although many disabled people can live and thrive in the community, the multiply handicapped and fragile are at a huge disadvantage if they can’t speak, walk or toilet themselves. (Straus study)
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p>The insistence on community living whether appropriate or not has a body count. Not only is the community system of living too fragmented for a number of medically fragile, handicapped people, but there is no oversight, as you rightly point out. There is no one truly minding the store in the vendor system. And why would we expect one if we have a vendor running the department? Did you see the story this week about the guy who, on several occasions, drove the people of whom he was supposed to transport to his house, locked them in a 85 degree car and mowed his lawn? How about the Vinfen group home that was condemned in November?
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p>So amen, dear Sister Amberpaw.
Bureaucracies inability to change…and in many cases radically change…whether it is a government, non-profit, corporation, union ect…we are surrounded by inept and unresponsive bureaucratic entities that are driving this great society into a slow collapse. More money is not the solution to improving social services…all that does is throw more money into a wasteful and uncaring system.
There is a lack of oversight in the community and if I remember correctly there was a push, by the vendors, to further reduce that oversight because it was too cumbersome.
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p>I believe there was a post on BMG about this. Does anyone else remember this.
http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/d…
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p>And don’t forget the experience of Cathy McDonough in a group home, which is recounted in this post:
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p>http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/d…