Hospital Care & Disability Support: What Needs to Change?

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4 mins

A lot of people with disabilities find that the healthcare they receive when in hospital is poor, which is why making changes such as better communication, more time given to people with disabilities, and clearer and easier to understand information is so important. Implementing simple changes such as thes can make all the difference.


In Learning Disability Week, the 2018 campaign theme being ‘Treat Me Well’, aimed to focus on the hospital care that people with disabilities receive and how it can be improved. This campaign aimed to highlight the issues and force the NHS to take action and make changes in the ways in which people with disabilities are treated. Ideally, the campaign hoped to change how people with disabilities are treated in hospital, reducing fear, wrong diagnoses and avoidable deaths.
 

Taking all of that into account, we have put together a guide to what needs to change in terms of the medical care that people with disabilities receive, and how health workers can do more to support people with disabilities.

 

Training is crucial
 

Without adequate training in place, healthcare workers cannot be expected to understand how to treat people with learning disabilities. However, that’s while learning disability awareness training should be mandatory for all senior medical staff, and potentially for less senior team members too.
 

Currently, that is not the case, most disability support training is offered to healthcare workers but is not mandatory, when it should be. If the NHS was to roll out mandatory learning disability awareness training, this would have a huge impact on the quality of care received.

 

Understanding is key
 

What is great about a large number of the learning disability awareness courses that are available for healthcare workers, is that they are run by people with disabilities. This means that these courses equip workers with a deeper insight into what people with disabilities require, they provide them with an understanding of what living with a disability is actually like.
 

This is a key element of supporting people with learning difficulties in healthcare because understanding how they think and what their needs are is what it takes to deliver a high-quality care experience. If you don’t understand a person’s individual needs, you cannot help them effectively.

 

Communication is vital
 

A large number of healthcare workers don’t know how to effectively communicate with people who have learning disabilities. They speak to them like they do every other patient - the problem is that this isn’t always helpful as often, they can struggle to understand. What can work well is speaking in a clear and concise manner, and asking the patient what support they require to better understand what is going on with their medical care.
 

Simple steps like creating an easy-to-read care plan for the patient can work well. Or using images to explain different treatments and tests can also be useful. All patients require effective communication, but patients with disabilities require communication in a different way, and it’s important for healthcare workers to understand that.
 

If a patient cannot explain that he or she has pain in their stomach because they are mainly non-verbal, they could be misdiagnosed which could have potentially catastrophic results. However, by giving them a picture of the human body with body parts labelled, you could ask them to point out where it hurts. You could also use images of different types of pain, such as pulling, squeezing, burning, etc. to help them to explain more about the pain that they are having. The same goes for other symptoms.

 

Ensure the tools are available
 

Once you have learned some simple hacks for making treating people with learning difficulties easier, it’s important to invest in tools for them. You never know who will be brought into your ward, so it’s crucial that you have all the tools that you need available to you.
 

Create a cupboard full of tools for making simpler communication and understanding easier, so that whenever you have a patient in who struggles to communicate, these can be used. Spend time researching the ways in which other healthcare providers cater to the needs of their patients with disabilities, and use their ideas for inspiration.
 

There’s far more to providing quality disability care than this, but this guide provides a simple insight into what care for people with disabilities is lacking when it comes to healthcare, and what changes need to be made.

 

Want to help change the way that people with learning disabilities are treated in hospitals? Become a champion for disability care and support - to learn more visit the Mencap website or search '#TreatMeWell' on social media. 

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