Investigating premature deaths of people with intellectual disabilities: who is protecting whom?

Abstract

In the light of the Corona Virus pandemic which prematurely killed an unknown number of disabled people, the main purpose of this Current Issue paper is to raise questions about how historians can investigate the subject of premature death given the fact that any records which name individual patients are closed due to ‘patient confidentiality’. It makes links between historic failures to investigate premature death, and recent examples, and argues that we need to challenge the blanket assumption that people are protected by having information about them kept confidential.