Senior decision makers from Coventry and Warwickshire’s public health system met last week with our H Team—made up of people with learning disabilities championing healthier, longer lives for themselves and their peers—to discuss how we can keep pushing for better health care and health outcomes for disabled people. The meeting was arranged in response to […]
Rishard Beckett—actor, model and member of our dedicated Health Team (or ‘H Team’)—successfully completed a 16-mile walk from his home in Rugby to his hometown of Coventry last week (Thursday 25 September) to raise awareness of barriers he and other people with learning disabilities still face when accessing health care in Coventry and Warwickshire. Rishard […]
Grapevine’s work is about strengthening people, sparking community around them and then shifting power in their lives and the systems that serve them. We do that for two reasons. A lot of what an individual life needs to make a long lasting move forward – things like love, hope, optimism, intimacy – can really only […]
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week – a week dedicated to tackling stigma and helping people prioritise theirs and others’ mental health. So we’re using this opportunity to lift up a project that is really quite special. One we are proud to be part of. ActUp! are a group of 18-25s using their lived experience […]
We’re welcoming two new(ish) starters to the Grapevine team – Herbie Cullip and Emma O’Brien! They join us on our long-running project strengthening learning disabled and autistic people and enabling them to build the lives they want. Also known as Help and Connect. Help and Connect is a small, friendly team supporting Coventry people to […]
World Mental Health Day (10 October) is a day to talk about mental health and show everyone that mental health matters.* Today we share a local story we hope will help show that the answer to many of our problems lies in the community’s power to bring love, hope and intimacy into our lives. We […]
This just in – the number of Annual Health Checks carried out for people with learning disabilities in Coventry and Warwickshire has jumped up 32 per cent in the past 12 months! The steady climb from 39 per cent in April 2020 – at the start of the UK’s Covid crisis – to just over […]
In September we launched a year-long campaign to bring awareness to the importance of annual health checks for people with learning disabilities. What gave the campaign urgency were the shocking mortality rates for people with a learning disability who were dying up to 27 years younger* than the general population, many from preventable causes. […]
People with learning disabilities are dying young from preventable and treatable medical conditions at a far higher rate than the general population, NHS England statistics reveal*. ‘Far higher than’ equates to a woman with a learning disability losing her life 27 years sooner on average than a woman without a learning disability. For men, their […]