Health

People with a learning disability are living longer, yet they are still dying 20 years younger than the rest of the population. It is well known that people with a learning disability are more likely to live with other health conditions such as diabetes, epilepsy, dementia and dysphasia.

Ensuring we keep our Promise of supporting each individual to feel good about themselves and to stay safe and healthy is extremely important to us at MacIntyre.

We have taken considerable steps to ensuring good health and wellbeing for the people we support. This has involved:

Making health recording more robust and accessible to ensure accurate and timely diagnoses can be given by health professionals
Having health information in an Easy Read format to help the people we support understand their health and changing health needs
Creating resources and documentation to upskill staff in all areas of health

Industry resources

MacIntyre is also actively involved in reviewing and contributing to key industry resources, publications and best practice guidelines. Examples include:

VODG resource: Preparing to visit the doctor
VODG focus on tackling health inequalitiesPublic Health England report on Learning Disability and Dementia Reasonable Adjustments
Dementia Friends information session resource for adults with learning disabilities

MacIntyre resources

Health recording is a big focus of our health agenda at MacIntyre. In 2016, we undertook a review of what we currently record about a person we support and how much of this relates to their health. We have since produced documents and removed duplication to enable our staff and the person to better record a person’s health and changing needs.

The Health Calendar, also known as the Anticipatory Care Calendar produced by the Innovation Agency, a stream of the NHS in the North West, is a key tool which all of our staff use to capture a person’s baseline in regards to their health and wellbeing and is a great tool in daily recording of health changes. We know this will support a person with receiving a timely diagnosis of any condition, which is one of our key objectives.

Health Resources

As part of sharing our expertise we created a number of resources.
These include:

guides
posters
leaflets
case studies.

View our health resources

Dementia resources

Alongside general health and wellbeing resources, we developed resources about supporting people with learning disabilities and dementia.

View our dementia resources

Health Special Interest Group

The aim of each meeting is not only to give an update on various health topics and to ensure all staff are informed of any changes and revisions, but also to collaborate on creating resources for staff, families and the people supported by MacIntyre.

Related Expertise

Autism

We understand that each child, young person or adult with autism that we support is unique.

Dementia

We have expertise in supporting people with dementia or at risk of developing dementia.

Communication

We believe that everyone, irrespective of the complexity of his or her needs, wants to and does communicate.

Learning Disability

It is estimated that 1.5 million people in the UK have a learning disability.