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 H Team health advocate Rishard’s 16-mile walk from Rugby to Coventry in September, raising awareness of health inequalities experienced by people with learning disabilities. The walk was covered by local TV and radio stations.
Rishard was spurred into action by the latest national LeDeR report (Learning from the lives and deaths of people with a learning disability and autistic people) which revealed people are dying 19.5 years younger than the general population and are almost twice as likely to die from an avoidable cause of death.
On learning about Rishard’s walk for equality, Viral Kantaria (Chief Integration Officer for Mental Health, Learning Disabilities and Autism for Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care Board) approached us for a meeting to continue the conversation.
Viral was joined at December’s meeting by Adrian Hutchins (Learning Disability and Autism Programme Manager for Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust) and Lexi Ireland (Strategic Lead for Health Equity, also for CWPT).
Hosting the trio at our Grapevine offices in Spon End in Coventry, we showed them the H Team’s latest awareness video which includes footage from Rishard’s walk. Watch it on YouTube here.
Our H Team set the meeting agenda and led with their public narrative on how health barriers faced by people with learning disabilities are still cutting lives short.
Part of it reads: “The people who can help us on our mission—that strives for fair access to health care and dreams of a time where the LeDeR report tells us good news—where we see that disabled people are living longer and they’re not dying from things we could prevent.
“That shouldn’t need to be our dream, to have a world that values our lives in the same way as it does for non-disabled people.”
Viral shared that Coventry and Warwickshire ICB has been working on improvements including more effective annual health check appointments for people with learning disabilities and more consistent next steps following this, such as personalised health action plans.
Our H Team spoke of striving for a “gold standard” for annual health checks where their regularity, space for reasonable adjustments and attention to patients’ health passports are not solely dependent on the knowledge and experience of individual health care professionals. Health care should not be a postcode lottery.
We will meet again next April.
In the meantime, our H Team plans to work on what a gold standard for annual health checks means for them and also further promotion of the ‘Learning Disability Friendly Practice’ accreditation scheme that 28 GP surgeries have so far been awarded.
Watch this space for news!