£2m funding announced to improve the lives of people with a learning disability in Wales

8 Mar 2019 01:09 PM

The Minister for Health and Social Services, Vaughan Gething recently (08 March 2019) announced £2m in Welsh Government funding to improve NHS services for people with learning disabilities.

This new investment is part of Learning Disability: Improving Lives Programme, which aims to improve the way services are delivered to people with a learning disability in Wales. The programme of work covers housing, health, education, transport and social care services.

The £2m announced recently will be used to achieve improvements related to the health actions in the programme, over the next three years, including:

• reduce the inappropriate use of medication and restraint through increasing the use of a range of evidence based interventions such as positive behavioural support
• improve the take up and quality of annual health checks offered by GPs to people with a learning disability
• improve the capability and capacity of acute hospital care to make reasonable adjustments enabling people with a learning disability to access mainstream services
• to ensure that people with complex needs have timely and easy access to learning disability specialist services including trauma/crisis, the full range of accommodation including secure provision and out of hours access
• implement the specialist and mainstream school nursing framework – a set of evidence based standards for nursing in schools.

Minister for Health and Social Services, Vaughan Gething, recently said: 

“In our ‘Prosperity for All’ strategy we have committed to improving the overall health and well-being of all individuals in Wales. 

“This new investment will support improvements in health services for people with a learning disability to reduce health inequalities and to help improve people’s health and quality of life.”