To leave feedback following your Learning disability appointment please click the link below:
Here at Broomfield Park Medical Centre, we want to ensure that all our patients have equal access to healthcare.
Patients who live with a learning disability face more barriers to accessing healthcare. Having a learning disability can affect how a person learns new things throughout life. Depending on the complexity of their learning disability, they may need a range of extra support throughout life.
Why focus on people with a learning disability?
Having a learning disability affects the way a person understands information, and how they communicate. This means they can have difficulty understanding new or complex information, learning new skills, or coping independently.
People with learning disabilities have individual strengths and abilities. These should be recognised alongside meeting any support needs that are identified.
Care and support services for people with a learning disability should be person-centred, empowering them to make their own choices about what’s important to them in their lives.
Around 950,000 adults and 300,000 children in England have a learning disability. Many people with a learning disability experience poorer health, and die at a younger age.
Over 20 years less life
Compared with the wider population, the average age at death for people with a learning disability is 23 years younger for men, and 27 years younger for women.
Reducing health inequalities
Health inequalities are unfair and avoidable differences in health across the population and between different groups within society.
People with a learning disability are underserved in access to healthcare and experience high levels of health inequality.
Research has shown that, compared with the general population, people with a learning disability were 3 to 4 times as likely to die from an avoidable medical cause of death. Most of the avoidable deaths in people with a learning disability were because timely and effective treatment was not given.
Helping people to access support and care
When someone has a learning disability, it’s important that it’s recorded in their health record. This will help to ensure they receive the care and support they need.
What Broomfield Park are doing to help
We have implemented Learning Disability Champion’s Dr Bancroft & Carol Foster ANP. Together with Jess Trainee Nursing Associate they will facilitate reasonable adjustments for our learning-disabled patients such as ensuring that when their annual health check is due, it will be booked into a specific learning disability review appointment. This is to help reduce the stressors caused by waiting in the public waiting room and to avoid unnecessary delays if the GP is running behind. We also have added a message to the patients’ medical records stating “purple priority patient”. This is an initiative to identify to our reception team, that this demographic of patients should be prioritised for access to appointments and will be offered the very next appointment and whereby they may need a sooner appointment staff are to liaise with our On-Call Dr to assess, as LD patients are more likely to end up in hospital.
We have now implemented a feedback form that will be sent to our LD patients after their annual review so their opinions and feedback can help us drive better patient care and accessibility needs. We will also have a QR code in the surgery if Patients would prefer to access the forms this way.
Our Learning disability reviews are undertaken by our LD lead ANP – Carol Foster who has had specific training in this area and we were a pilot practice for ensuring that we prioritise our Learning Disability Patients.
- The appointment with the ANP will last approximately 30 minutes.
- Patients also need a 30-minute appointment with our Trainee Nursing Associate or Practice Nurse before or following this appointment (on the same day).
- Patients will be sent out a blood form with their appointment letter and will need to have their blood taken at least one week before their scheduled Health Check with us. This is so the ANP can ensure that a full health screen is undertaken, which is necessary to complete the health check.
The type of questions you will be asked during your consultation are in this questionnaire. So if you wish you can print of the questionnaire to help you and bring to your appointment: