Learning Disability: Death

(asked on 15th May 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has plans to bring forward legislative proposals to make mandatory the reporting of all early deaths of people with learning disabilities.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 22nd May 2018

In March 2017, the National Quality Board published National Guidance on Learning from Deaths in order to support a consistent approach to delivering better quality reviews and investigations that identify lessons that can be used to improve care. The guidance states that all inpatient, outpatient and community patient deaths of people with learning disabilities should be reviewed so that learning can contribute to service improvements. The guidance also states that individual trusts should publish mortality data on a quarterly basis from 2017-18 including estimates of how many deaths are thought to be due to problems in care, including deaths of people who had a learning disability. The Government introduced regulations in 2017/18 to require trusts to summarise their quarterly data and provide evidence of learning and improvements they have made to prevent such deaths in their annual Quality Accounts from June 2018.

The National Health Service (Quality Accounts) (Amendment) Regulations 2017 are available at:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2017/744/contents/made

The National Health Service (Quality Accounts) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2018 are available at:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/59/contents/made

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