Abstract
BackgroundChildren and young people with learning disabilities experience poor health outcomes and lengthier hospital admissions than those without learning disabilities. No consistently applied, systematic approach exists across the NHS to identify and record this population. This paper describes practices in English hospitals to identify children and young people with learning disabilities.Method Interviews: 65 NHS staff. Questionnaire: 2,261 NHS staff. Conducted across 24 NHS hospitals in England.ResultsNo standardized approach exists to identify children or young people with a learning disability or for this information to be consistently recorded, communicated to relevant parties within a hospital, Trust or across NHS services. Staff reported a reliance on parents to inform them about their child's needs but concerns about “flagging” patients might be a significant barrier.DiscussionWithout an integrated systematic way across the NHS to identify children with learning disabilities, their individual needs will not be identified.
Highlights
Following on from the “Six Lives” report (Parliamentary & Health Service Ombudsman & Local Government Ombudsman, 2009), the current policy drive around the care of patients with learning disabilities (LD) reinforces the view that to be in a position to meet needs and to prevent premature death, needs must first be identified
This paper reports on the practices of a sample of English hospitals who employ a process to identify this population with LD
There is no standardized way of identifying children and young peo‐ ple with LD and their individual needs across hospitals in the NHS in England
Summary
Evidence suggests that staff rely on parents to supervise, protect, advocate and look after their child's medical needs and behaviours whilst in hospital (Mimmo, Harrison, & Hinchcliff, 2018). There is clearly an important difference between identifying that a child or young person has LD and recording what reasonable ad‐ justments are required, and ensuring those reasonable adjustments are consistently delivered during their hospital admission in a timely way (Turner & Robinson, 2011). “Pay More Attention” is a NIHR funded mixed methods study aiming to identify the factors that facilitate and prevent children and young people with long‐term conditions with and without LD from receiving equal access to high‐quality hospital care and services. The wider context and overall findings are reported in Oulton et al (2018)
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