People with learning disabilities placed out of area: the South London experience

with learning disabilities who offend or have offending-type behaviours placed ‘out of area’ many miles from local services. This move of people out of area has made it difficult in many localities to develop local services and to monitor the quality of care for this group. This paper describes the start of an exercise to examine potential local care pathways for those who present with offending behaviours and to look at differences between the out of area group, and another receiving treatment locally. Within the two groups we found no significant differences regarding rates of psychiatric disorder, quality of life or levels of unmet need. The main difference was that the out of area group was largely characterised by a range of aggressive and challenging behaviour, necessitating the additional structure and securities provided by out of area placements.