What this is
On 19 September 2019 NHS Digital published its monthly learning disability and autism statistics, combining the Assuring Transformation collection, which counts inpatients commissioned by the NHS in England, with the Mental Health Services Dataset. The release covered data from 1 September 2014 to 31 August 2019.
Mencap and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation analysed the same release and published their own reading of it. Their figures are a charity’s count drawn from official returns, not an official statistic.
What it records
More than 10,000 uses of restrictive interventions in the three months from April to June 2019. Almost a third of them, 3,230, were against children, per Mencap’s release of 19 September 2019. April 2019 alone recorded 3,715 interventions, the highest monthly figure reported at that point.
The same release counted 2,255 people with a learning disability and/or autism in inpatient units at the end of August 2019, of whom 245 were children, per NHS Digital’s own figures. Its ward-stays data recorded 430 patients restrained at least once.
Mencap’s conclusion was that progress had stalled. The inpatient count had fallen by five people since the government’s Transforming Care targets were missed at the end of March 2019. The charities described the settings as “modern day asylums”, and noted that patients are often hundreds of miles from their loved ones and that levels of restraint were going up rather than down.
How to read it
The 10,000 figure counts uses, not people. The 430 counts patients, not episodes. Read separately, each answers a different question, and neither answers the one a family asks about a ward: how many children, restrained how many times.
Physical and chemical restraint are bundled together in the charities’ framing, so the total is not a count of physical holds. It is a count of recorded restrictive interventions, however they were recorded.
A fall in inpatient numbers is not a fall in restraint. The two figures moved in opposite directions in this release, which is the whole reason the charities published their own reading of it.
And quote it as Mencap’s figure. The dataset is official; this count is a reading of it, and should be attributed that way.
Where it stops
One quarter, one nation, and only people whose care was commissioned by the NHS in England. It says nothing about children’s homes, schools, or adult social care, and nothing about what has happened since September 2019.
The release carried its own warning: the Mental Health Services Dataset inpatient figures and the Assuring Transformation figures differ, work was under way to understand why, and the MHSDS learning disability data were labelled experimental.
The underlying tables were not opened for this page, so the figures are as the charities published them and are unverified at table level. Confidence: probable, and not to be quoted as an official statistic.
Sources
- Mencap, Over 10,000 reported uses of restrictive interventions in three months, 19 September 2019
- NHS Digital, Learning Disability Services Monthly Statistics (AT: August 2019, MHSDS: June 2019 Final), 19 September 2019
Where restraint is going up in a service that is meant to be closing, our restraint reduction training covers the data a provider has to keep to see it, and what to do with it.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.