Pauline Heslop summarises a UK primary care study that shows how emergency hospital admissions for preventable conditions can be reduced in people with learning disabilities who receive annual health checks.
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People with learning disabilities are more likely to experience a range of health issues and one response to this has been the introduction of annual health checks by GPs.
Here, Alix Dixon looks at a study in Northern Ireland which set out to discover the impact of health facilitation posts on the uptake of these health checks
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We know that people with learning disabilities experience poor health and unequal access to healthcare but what about access to preventative healthcare measures?
Here, in her debut blog, Angela Henderson looks at a Canadian study, which looked at matched groups of people with and without learning disabilities to look at rates of uptake of regular health checks and participation in cancer screening as indicators of preventative healthcare.
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People with learning disabilities experience health inequalities compared to the general population, compounded by the number of health related problems thye may have related to having a learning disability.
Here, in her debut blog, Tara Quinn-Cirillo adds her reflections to an assessment of this incentivised scheme.
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The Learning Disability Carers Community is calling for parents and carers to take part in a survey of annual health checks. Read on to find out how you can get involved.
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The Directed Enhanced Scheme offers reimbursement to GP surgeries to carry out annual health checks for people with learning disabilities. Here, we report on a cohort study which looked at the impact of the scheme over a three year period.
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During her presidency of the BMA, Professor Sheila Hollins has hosted a number of seminars on issues faced by vulnerable groups in the NHS, one of which looked at the issues facing people with learning disabilities. This report by the BMA Board of Science aims to move towards ‘parity of esteem’, a term which is [read the full story…]
UK law requires public services to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people following the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and the Equality Act (2010), which does not cover Northern Ireland. For people with physical disabilities these have predominantly focused on the environment, whilst for people with a learning disabilities it requires more commonly clear explanations and [read the full story…]
Annual health checks for people with learning disabilities were introduced as part of the Direct Enhanced Service in England in 2008 and a recent review of studies involving over 5000 people with learning disabilities showed that the provision of checks consistently found unmet health needs and enabled targeted action to address these needs. Health checks [read the full story…]
Annual health checks for people with learning disabilities were introduced as part of the introduction of a Direct Enhanced Service in England in 2008. Although researchers have found that despite such a clear policy framework, in 2009/2010 only 41% of people who were eligible for a health check received one. Reviews of the literature have [read the full story…]
