People with learning disabilities have low take-up rates for health promotion or screening activities. Work in the south west of the country to look at reasonable adjustments a couple of years ago resulted in a number of recommendations for local action along with recommendations to the national cancer screening programmes regarding the identification of people [read the full story…]
It is widely acknowledged that individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMI) such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe depression have increased rates of mortality, due to poor physical health. As well as reducing quality of life and function and decreasing life expectancy, physical illness can worsen these mental illnesses. The reasons for this include lifestyle [read the full story…]
Yesterday we looked at a review of the effectiveness of oral examination to detect potentially malignant disorders and mouth cancer today we are looking the latest version of the Cochrane review on screening programmes for the detection and prevention of oral cancer. The overall aim of this review was to assess the effectiveness of current [read the full story…]
The lines between physical health and mental health are blurred in lots of ways, and one example is the fact that people with chronic physical conditions are also more likely to suffer from depression. As well as adding to their burden of illness, there’s also some evidence that those patients with comorbid depression have worse [read the full story…]
Behaviour within an intimate relationship which causes psychological, physical or sexual harm to either party is known as intimate partner violence (IPV). This violence is perpetrated by both men and women, but significant injuries are more commonly sustained by women. Consequently, IPV is a major public health concern as it contributes majorly to mortality in [read the full story…]
Annual health checks for people with learning disabilities were introduced as part of the Direct Enhanced Service in England in 2008 and a recent review of studies involving over 5000 people with learning disabilities showed that the provision of checks consistently found unmet health needs and enabled targeted action to address these needs. Health checks [read the full story…]
As part of its excellent ‘Too Much Medicine’ series, the British Medical Journal last week published an important analysis of the current direction of travel in the field of dementia care. The article is hard to ignore, written as it is by highly authoritative academics from the UK and Australia, including Professor Carol Brayne, an [read the full story…]
Lower rates of cervical and breast cancer screening have been reported in women with learning disabilities when compared to the general population. The researchers in this Canadian Study set out to look at whether there were any differences in the rates of cervical and breast screening between women with learning disabilities and those without. As [read the full story…]
Studies have shown that women with learning disabilities are less likely than those without disabilities to have access to cervical and breast cancer screening services as set out in the relevant clinical guidelines. The team at Improving Health and Lives, the learning disabilities public health observatory (LDPHO) reported that reasonable adjustments were not being made [read the full story…]
We have posted previously about health checks for people with learning disabilities, for example, the work of My Life My Choice, who looked at why it was that so few people with learning disabilities in their locality were getting access to annual health checks. We have also posted about the findings of a systematic review [read the full story…]
