Hear page
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- Autism Self Assessment Framework, Preliminary report
- Annual health checks
- How many people receive health checks?
- How effective are health checks?
- More information
- Matt Hoghton Presentation
- Annual Report
- Gaps in what the NHS counts
- Local variations in how many people have learning disabilities
- How many NHS patients have learning disabilities?
- Health inequalities and people with learning disabilities
- How people with learning disabilities die
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- Monitoring local need
- What Learning Disability Registers can tell us
- Estimating age and gender-specific death rates
- Reasonable adjustments
- partnershipboardreports
- autsaf2011
This page was written by
Eric Emerson
How effective are health checks?
We have reviewed all relevant scientific studies on the effectiveness of health checks for people with learning disabilities. The introduction of health checks for people with learning disabilities nearly always leads to:
- the detection of unmet, unrecognised and potentially treatable health conditions (including serious and life threatening conditions such as cancer, heart disease and dementia);
- targeted actions to address these health needs.
Given the specific difficulties faced by people with learning disabilities, we believe that targeted health checks are an effective and important ‘reasonable adjustment’ to primary health care services in the UK. It is the legal duty (under the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995, 2005 and the Equality Act 2010) of primary care services to make such adjustments.
More information on the impact of health checks is available in our report and in a short summary.