Learning disabilities and autism

People with learning disabilities and autistic people experience significant health inequalities compared to other people. The inequalities they experience has been made even worse by the pandemic. We are making sure that people with a learning disability and autistic people in South West London do not face any disadvantages in accessing health services so that we can meet their health and care needs.

How we’re making a difference

What are we doing?

In 2022/23 our priorities are:

Annual health checks

We have developed plans to increase the rate of annual health checks for people aged 14 and over on a GP Learning Disability register towards 75% in 2023/24.

We are making sure that every annual health check is accompanied by a health action plan to identify actions to improve a person’s health.

Improving GP learning disability registers

We are continuing to improve the accuracy of GP learning disability registers so that the identification and coding of patients is complete, particularly for underrepresented groups like children and young people and people from ethnic minority groups.

Keeping people out of hospital

We are expanding existing community based services and developing new services to reduce the number of people who need to be admitted to hospital. As well as trying to reduce the number of people who are admitted, we are developing new pathways to support discharge from hospital for people who are admitted.

Improving diagnosis

We are adopting best practice to improve local diagnostic pathways to minimise waiting times for diagnosis.

Learning Disability Mortality Reviews

Implementing the actions coming out of Learning Disability Mortality Reviews (LeDeRs), including following deaths of people who are autistic, to tackle the inequalities experienced by people with a learning disability.