We have just published on our website a DH-commissioned systematic review of the effectiveness of health checks for people with learning disabilities.

The introduction of health checks for people with learning disabilities nearly always leads to:

• the detection of unmet, unrecognised and potentially treatable health conditions (including serious and life threatening conditions such as cancer, heart disease and dementia);
• targeted actions to address these health needs.

Given the specific difficulties faced by people with learning disabilities, we believe that targeted health checks are an effective and important ‘reasonable adjustment’ to primary health care services in the UK. It is the legal duty (under the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995, 2005 and the Equality Act 2010) of primary care services to make such adjustments.

More information on the impact of health checks is available in our report (http://www.improvinghealthandlives.org.uk/uploads/doc/vid_7646_IHAL2010-04HealthChecksSystemticReview.pdf)

Eric

Eric Emerson

Co-Director

www.ihal.org.uk

Professor of Disability & Health Research
Centre for Disability Research
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YT
UK

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/cedr/

Visiting Professor

Faculty of Health Sciences

Cumberland Campus C42
University of Sydney

PO Box 170
Lidcombe NSW 1825
Australia

http://www.afdsrc.org/

Please consider the environment before printing my email.