ON THIS DAY last year (25 September) Rugby man Rishard Beckett walked 16 miles along the canal towpath from his home in the Warwickshire town to Coventry to raise awareness of barriers he and other people with learning disabilities face when accessing health care.
Barriers that mean they are almost twice as likely to die from an avoidable cause of death – pneumonia and epilepsy being two of the most common.
Walking 16 miles was the equivalent of Rishard walking just over a mile for every year the lives of people with learning disabilities are cut short compared to people in the general population.
In the past year, a new LeDeR report* has been published by NHS England with King’s College London. Again, their figures show these health inequalities remain the same – people with learning disabilities are still dying 19 years younger, on average, than other people.
At the time of Rishard’s walk, supported by Grapevine’s Molly and Emma and peers from our H (for Health) Team, he said: “You know I have walked 16 miles to get here. What you may not know is all the barriers I’ve faced on my journey.
“I’ve made it through these barriers today, but many will not… the change we need is not happening fast enough.”
We’ve shared Rishard’s interview with BBC Midlands Today below.
The Casey Commission is an independent commission into adult social care, chaired by Baroness Louise Casey, who will report back to the Prime Minister on its findings over the next two years.
Baroness Casey said in a recent ITV news interview that she hopes to speed up this process so the government can make progress on transforming adult social care to better meet the different needs of older adults and working age disabled adults.
In the interview she said people with learning disabilities are “often voiceless”.
She said: “I think people with learning disabilities are often completely overlooked, completely forgotten, because essentially there aren’t millions of them.”
Watch the ITV interview here.
Look out for updates on work our H Team is undertaking in partnership with Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care Board including:
- Their short film on cervical screening myth busting
- A kitemarking scheme for annual health checks that meet gold standards
- A very exciting music video all about bowel screening… (name to be revealed!).
*LeDeR stands for ‘Learning from Lives and Deaths – people with a learning disability and autistic people’.