ITV NEWS has shone a spotlight on the shocking death of Adrian Poulton, a 56-year-old man with Down’s syndrome who lived at home with his parents for most of his life.
He ‘died after not being given any food for nine days whilst being treated in an NHS hospital’.
It would be fairer to say that he was not being treated at Poole Hospital, where he was admitted in September 2021, having broken a hip in a fall at his care home. Although his ‘hip was on the mend’, hospital doctors ‘incorrectly listed’ Adrian as ‘nil by mouth’. After being effectively starved, unsurprisingly, he died.
His father Derek Poulton said: ‘Not being medical, we just naturally thought he was having nutrition, a feed. But as it turns out, they were starving him.’
By the time his ‘family realised he wasn’t being fed’, Adrian ‘was too unwell to recover’, dying on 28 September 2021, ‘two weeks after being admitted to hospital.’
The official hospital report into his death cited ‘lack of nutrition’ as a contributing factor and ‘recommended education across the Trust on learning disability specialist care’.
Dr Peter Wilson, the Chief Medical Officer at University Hospitals Dorset, told ITV News: ‘We offer our sincere condolences once again to [Adrian’s] family and have apologised for the failings that resulted in his death.
‘At the time, we undertook a serious incident investigation to identify any learning points. We have implemented a number of changes following this and have shared these with the family.’
A letter from 16 charities and disability campaigners to Wes Streeting warns the Health Secretary of a lack of ‘learning disability nurses and training for NHS staff on learning disabilities and autism’.
It urges Streeting ‘to intervene to halt the sharp decline in specialist nurses’.
It states: ‘The learning disability nursing workforce has declined by 43 per cent since records began in 2009’, and saying that if ‘nothing changes, it is predicted by 2028 there will only be a tiny number of learning disability nurses qualifying in England, with a pattern of reducing numbers in the other UK countries too’.
ITV News also discovered ‘that NHS England has failed to meet its own targets to provide mandatory learning disability and autism training’.
One wonders what special training is needed to identify the basic human need for food and drink, but Adrian Poulton is not the only victim of this ‘care-free’ attitude to the mentally infirm.
The ITV report, which found ‘a crisis in the care of learning disabled and autistic people’, featured various ‘bereaved families of people with learning disabilities’, who said they believe their children died due to failures in NHS learning disability care.
Indeed, a separate ITV investigation unearthed a September 2025 government-commissioned report which revealed that ‘people with a learning disability are dying on average 20 years younger than the general population’.
This might be seen as the unfortunate result of communication difficulties between patients and carers, but in fact ‘almost 40 per cent of deaths of learning disabled people were deemed to be avoidable’.
Elsewhere, TCW has reported on the worrying issue of patient neglect in NHS hospitals, and while various explanations are offered, it seems clear that having a mental disability, far from warranting more careful treatment, can sometimes amount to a death sentence.
This view is supported by my own experience of having a close relative who was placed ‘in the community’ after having lived for decades in a psychiatric hospital; one might just as well put an eight-year-old child in their own flat and leave them to it.
Prior to being discharged from hospital, patients were given some training on how to manage – cookery lessons, etc – but judging by the state of his flat, there was not much on dusting, vacuuming and cleaning, and nothing at all on answering letters, paying bills, and actually eating anything.
‘Political correctness’ would deem him ‘learning disabled’ despite being, from a very young age, a walking encyclopaedia; indeed, the gardeners at the hospital called him ‘the professor’.
Unfortunately, while more respectful euphemisms have been mandated, more respectful treatment has failed to materialise.
And in a further example of the ‘two-tier’ approach, we have been sternly lectured about treating ‘trans’ individuals with respect, while people with ‘learning disabilities’ are not treated at all – although even less respectful individuals (aka criminals) can ‘diagnose’ them a mile off and do not hesitate to prey upon them.
This included my own relative, but thankfully, the police were always helpful in tracking him down when he went missing – although dealing with day-to-day problems arising from the disastrous ‘don’t care in the community’ policy has undoubtedly damaged their crime-fighting capacity.
Thanks to a very helpful psychiatric social worker, we managed to get him into sheltered accommodation, and when he went into hospital after an accident – we never discovered how it happened, and he could not remember – he was well treated.
However, there was always the fear that he would receive inferior care because of his mental condition. Perhaps he would have done if we had not been with him; I hope not.
Given the state of the economy, I fear that the shocking neglect of the most vulnerable among us will once again take a back seat; but then, the economy is always in a state, and it takes only a short leap of the imagination to reach the conclusion that the nation’s finances would be greatly improved by dispensing with people like him – after all, this is happening in Canada, where ‘euthanomics’ is now a reality.
Of course, we are not Nazis. Our nation produced Florence Nightingale, pioneer of modern nursing, and more recently Dame Cecily Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement.
But we also produced Parson Thomas Malthus, with his theory that the world would be grossly ‘overpopulated’ without the ‘benefit’ of war, famine and disease; also Sir Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement, from which sprang the campaigns for abortion and euthanasia.
And yet we are a nation characterised by kindness: we built the mental hospitals as real asylums for the mentally vulnerable – but we closed them down and sold off the land for luxury private dwellings while claiming that the patients had become ‘institutionalised’ and thus had forgotten how to look after themselves.
However, this narrative has been challenged. It has been argued that ‘back in the 1960s that the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill was a joint effort of fiscal conservatives and progressive civil libertarians: the former shuttering mental hospitals in the name of austerity, the latter for autonomy’s sake’ – leading, in the following six decades, to the number of psychiatric beds dwindling from a national total of 560,000 to a mere 35,000.
Selflessness can become self-centred when we encounter a disabled person and decide we ‘wouldn’t want to live like that’. But disability can happen to anyone, at any time, and if we do nothing to stop the ‘assisted dying’ Bill currently going through the House of Lords, it will be too late to wish we had helped people to live.
As a nation, we have a fine history of invention and problem solving. Let us not solve the ‘problem’ of the disabled – as well as the sick and the infirm elderly – by turning compassion into cruelty. Let us rather solve the problem of our own ‘learning difficulties’ by learning what it is really like to be in somebody else’s shoes when that somebody else is really vulnerable; by learning to offer real help.
The once-notorious Liverpool Care Pathway, under which the non-terminally ill were sedated, and nutrition and hydration withdrawn, is now a memory but if we fail to tackle its quiet resurgence, how long will it be before someone suggests that active euthanasia would be kinder than neglecting the disabled to death?
