Moondog and working - S&LT advice

[appropriatelytrained]

I'm looking for advice on information sharing with other professionals and record keeping for S&LT.

I signed, at stat ass time, a general consent form to allow information to be shared by S&LT for DS's benefit with other agencies.

I found out, in July, that senior S&LTs who had never met my son, had had meetings pre Tribunal to discuss his provision.

This was shared with me only as a result of my questioning the false claims made in a letter by the head of the service that his school had agreed he had a functioning programme in place all academic year. Her service did not actually come in until May.

I asked for copies of records of these meetings. This was ignored by the S&LT service and PALS and eventually I went to the PHSO.

They referred the matter back for local resolution after the Trust promised disclosure.

That was 2 months ago and still no disclosure although they have promised a meeting in the new year.

Can you refer me to any professional guidelines on:

(a) information sharing without informing the parent
(b) keeping records
(c) refusing to share records

Thanks!

All I can tell you is that I also, having requested copies of info.reports etc, and not getting them, requested all reports to do with my ds under " the freedom of information act". Took about 5 weeks-they asked me to send copies of my birth cert, I.D. etc and I had a large folder , containing all his reports,delivered by registered post only last week actually.

Communicating Quality (3) is our RCSLT bible on best practice.

I think everyone can view it
|Here
If you want a paper copy, ask your s/lt dept.

Have you done an official FOI request as ChristmasEvie suggested?

Also look at the Health Professions Council Standards of Proficiency for Speech and Language Therapists here

HPC are the official registrating body for all Allied Health Professions in the UK and the one with the most power.. Every SALT in the UK has to be registered with HPC but RCSLT is optional in many Trusts.

Thanks.

The FOI Act does not cover personal data, reports etc. This should be disclosed under the Data Protection Act. Even if you don't mention the DPA in your request, any request for the disclosure of medical records should be acted upon as a DPA request. There are strict time limits for compliance.

Health services know this. This request has been through the head of the service, PALS and now the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman who made them promise to release the information. They are required to do this by law.

It is not the nature of my request but the fact that they are concealing information deliberately. This is clearly because any information they have recorded (I am sure their secret meetings with LA and school were not actually recorded on DS's file) would show they were meeting for the purposes of Tribunal and not my son's benefit and were doing so without my consent.

They are dragging their feet and playing for time. I have gone back to the PHSO and will contact the ICO.

Thanks for the standards regarding the HPC and Communicating Quality.

Would you expect meetings with LAs to prepare for Tribunal to be discussed with parents and be recorded on file? The S&LT meeting was not even my son's S&LT but some senior bod they dragged out to try and list as a witness (refused twice by Tribunal).

Specific meetings about a client have to be recorded on file, and if not e.g. there was a meeting that was not specifically client related, it should be available via FOI but it might be hard to know what to ask for e.g. you would need to know what the meeting had been recorded as. As you say, if you are specific about what you are looking for, it should go through the Trust's FOI lead who will progress it as either FOI or DPA depending on which is more appropriate (but generally people in the trust will refer to it as the FOI pathway/protocol etc).

Really, it is pretty much illegal to not record anything official like that. In practice, sometimes I will have throwaway conversations with people in corridors that I don't record in any minute detail and truthfully I, like most people, probably forget the ins and outs of everything we ever discuss and don't record some conversations as I should. I have a central file in my language unit where every item that comes up "in between" sessions e.g. things that need progressing but are not related to the current care plans is recorded. It is written in maybe 10-15 times a day and I don't think that we really record everything as I would like us to, it is all quite bitty.

In contrast, I do a lot of training (Elklan etc) and adapting materials/resources to make them more generally accessible to what they call "low ability general mainstream" kids. This work isn't particularly well recorded in files etc as it is not client-specific.. so e.g. I have a caseload of about 12 in that session but a lot of what school uses my time for can't be recorded in their notes as it's not unique to them, which means if you looked in the notes, it would appear I have done naff all for the year... we are discussing ways around this at present because I am nervous about it, I don't like it..

These are normal sins of omission but to not record a proper meeting would really be extremely unusual and unprofessional. SEN Officers will ring to ask what has been done from time to time and this would be recorded, but it would be highly unorthodox for a SALT to meet to prepare someone for Tribunal. In general, SALT departments really try to stay out of these things as much as possible as it is an uncomfortable juncture between health and education. We have had one Tribunal in our area in the last ten years and it did take up a lot of prep time but this would all have been confined to the SALT department itself and not with Education.

Thanks working, that is really, really helpful.

The head of the department told me there had been a face to face meeting between this senior S&LT who had never met my son and my son's head teacher after I pressed her on her claims that he had had a programme in place since lat year.

Her answer was that this was confirmed by my son's head in this 'face to face meeting'.

So I asked for details of it, its purpose, the attendees and for details of any other meeting.

This is what they have been refusing to release - or just ignoring the request to do so. I guess because they cannot say they have not made a record if it was a meeting to discuss my son's provision but they do not want to say what the meeting was, who was there etc as it was clearly a Tribunal meeting to set a line for Tribunal on the failure of my son's provision.

S&LT here were adamantly opposed to direct therapy and wouldn't entertain discussion about it, pushing their collaborative model. Yet they failed to attend for the first five months post statement issue and when they did they did nothing to ensure the TA knew what she was doing. We got Cerebra vouchers and tried to offer training ourselves.

The S&LT who took over our son's case filed a 15 page report with Tribunal (at a time when no one was asking for reports) which was just a critique of our S&LT's report. She had not even met our son and his programme had not even started.

The LA's service level agreement with the S&LT service is to provide therapy on a collaborative model so they didn't want to move beyond that.