Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent progress his Department has made on reducing the health inequalities for people with a learning disability.

Annual general practitioner (GP) health checks are available to those patients on the GP learning disability register who are aged 14 years and over. Health checks and resulting action plans help to reduce recognised health inequalities as well as ensuring people’s reasonably adjusted care needs are communicated effectively to other National Health Service partners. The number of people who had an annual health check increased by 10% in 2017/18 compared with 2016/17, to 147,180. The NHS Long Term Plan commits to improve uptake of the existing annual health check so that at least 75% of those eligible have a health check each year.

NHS Improvement has introduced Learning Disability Improvement Standards for NHS trusts in England to help ensure that trusts monitor and review the care they provide to people with a learning disability or autism. Inclusion of the improvement standards in the NHS Standard Contract 2019/20, mandated by NHS England for use by commissioners of all healthcare services except primary care, means that all providers must have regard to the improvement standards.

NHS England and NHS Digital, in partnership with patient and carer groups and other key stakeholders are working to develop a national reasonable adjustment flag to indicate on electronic patient records, the reasonable adjustments which services can make to help people with learning disability access healthcare.

We will shortly consult on introducing mandatory learning disability training, which would include training staff on how to make reasonable adjustments for people with a learning disability.