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

The Minister for Health and Social Services, Vaughan Gething today announced £2m in Welsh Government funding to improve NHS services for people with learning disabilities.

Speaking from his constituency in Swansea East, Mike Hedges AM said… ‘This is good news for people in Wales with a learning disability, and their families and carers. I recently attended the Petition Committee at the Assembly which dealt with the petition from the Paul Ridd foundation regarding the lack of training for medical staff. Through this I am aware of the issues faced by people with Learning Difficulties accessing main stream Healthcare. I hope that this new investment will go some way to reducing the Health Inequalities faced by people with Learning Difficulties and reduce the chances of other people enduring the difficulties Mr Ridd and his family faced.’

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 today 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, 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.”

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