It’s deeply concerning to hear that frontline NHS staff are feeling “moral distress” from having too little time to spend with their patients (Most NHS staff say they don’t have enough time to spend with patients, 24 July). It creates a worrying picture for people with a learning disability, who often need extra time for appointments and already struggle to access basic healthcare.
Our helpline regularly receives calls from families seriously worried about quality of care and feeling they need to be there to advocate for their loved one. We hear stories of people being left in incontinence pads rather than being supported to go to the toilet, or having medication and care plans changed without clear explanation. We know that people on specialised diets have been fed the wrong food, sometimes with tragic consequences that could have been avoidable if time was spent reading their hospital notes.
This treatment is degrading and can have a long-lasting impact on people beyond their stay in hospital, undoing years of hard work gaining basic life skills to live independently.
It’s essential that all appointments for people with learning disabilities include reasonable adjustments that are person-centred and respond to an individual’s particular needs. It’s also a legal right.
The new NHS workforce strategy includes some positive changes for patients with learning disabilities, including increasing the number of learning disability nurses and developing NHS training programmes to enable health and care practitioners to expertly treat people with a learning disability across all aspects of medicine. This will hugely improve the quality of care people receive, but we are years away from this having an impact on people’s lives and it’s not going to fix the problem of our NHS staff feeling overstretched and time poor.
Dan Scorer
Head of policy, public affairs, information and advice, Mencap
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