Disability: Premature Deaths

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, the honour and great pleasure of following my noble friend Lady Fall falls to me, on these Benches, to welcome her warmly in the name of the whole House and congratulate her on her remarkable maiden speech. It was outstanding, by any standards—from Moscow to the Lords. This does not come as a surprise to anyone who knows the noble Baroness, as her curriculum vitae hardly begins to do her justice. Early on in her career, after having excelled at Oxford, she steered me through many difficult negotiations after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden into the European Union, extending the Fulbright/Monnet scholarships programme and much more. However, it is not just her dedication which distinguishes her, but also her other special qualities of loyalty, humility, astuteness, style, intelligence and genuine care for others. These qualities were revealed between the lines in her excellent and interesting maiden speech. We all hope that she will play a prominent part now in your Lordships’ House and that we shall hear a great deal more from her in the future on this and many other subjects.

Before making my modest contribution, I too would like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, for introducing this debate. I started my career working for the London County Council in Stepney, Bow and Poplar, for the children’s care committee, then trained as a nurse with the Red Cross—hence my interest in this debate.

As we have heard, people with learning disabilities experience significantly worse results than the rest of the population. Bristol University’s confidential inquiry, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, mentioned earlier, into the deaths of 247 people with learning disabilities from 2010 to 2012, discovered that men with learning disabilities died, on average, 13 years sooner than men in the general population, and women with learning disabilities died 20 years sooner. These studies show the urgent need to improve practice within the National Health Service. I therefore welcome all efforts that the NHS is making to tackle premature mortality among people with a learning disability.

I will mention two initiatives from which I hope we can learn lessons about how to improve on these results. The clinical commissioning group improvement and assessment framework was launched in March. It includes two indicators on learning disability: reliance on specialist in-patient care and the proportion of people on GP learning disability registers receiving an annual health check. I hope this will enable us to see clearer how clinical commissioning groups are performing. In March 2015, NHS England commissioned the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review programme. This programme aims to support local and regional areas, conduct reviews of deaths of people with learning disabilities and implement the recommendations and plans of action.

I hope the Minister will be able to address these few points and so contribute to alleviating the unhappiness and stress that this causes families.