Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure equality of access and provision of NHS care for patients with learning disabilities.

Individual trusts are now required to publish on a quarterly basis estimates of how many deaths they could have avoided had care been better, including separately reporting on deaths of people who had a learning disability, and to publish evidence of learning and improvements that are happening as a result of their data in annual Quality Accounts from June 2018.

NHS England’s Learning Disabilities Mortality Review Programme has been established to review the deaths of people with learning disabilities and implement any recommendations and plans of action. Every National Health Service region is testing the review process and, by March 2019, we expect every area to have established a process to undertake such reviews.

The regulatory body, NHS Improvement, works with NHS organisations to help ensure that relevant incidents are reported through all required channels in line with the revised Serious Incident Framework, which was published in 2015.

Under the Equality Act 2010, health services have a duty to address health inequality and ensure that reasonable adjustments are in place so as not to disadvantage people with learning disabilities. Legal duties were also introduced through the Health and Social Care Act 2012 so that NHS organisations have regard to the need to reduce inequalities in access to and outcomes from services.

The Government has set its expectation for the NHS in its Mandate to NHS England to reduce the health gap between people with mental health problems, learning disabilities and autism and the population as a whole, and support them to live full, healthy and independent lives.

Since, 1 August 2016, all organisations that provide NHS care are legally required to follow the Accessible Information Standard. The Standard sets out a specific, consistent approach to identifying, recording, flagging, sharing and meeting the information and communication support needs of patients, service users, carers and parents with a disability, impairment or sensory loss.