NHS England has published new guidance to support GP practices, PCNs and ICBs to improve the identification of people with a learning disability, and to strengthen the delivery of annual health checks and health action plans.
The aim is straightforward but important: earlier identification means more proactive healthcare, which in turn helps reduce health inequalities and premature mortality for a group of patients who are consistently underserved by the system. The guidance was developed with people with a learning disability themselves, family carers, health professionals and the voluntary and independent sector, so it’s built around what actually helps at practice level rather than a purely top-down framework.
For practices, this is worth treating as more than a box-ticking exercise. Annual health checks and health action plans only deliver on their purpose if patients are correctly identified on the register in the first place — miss someone at that first step and everything downstream, from the health check to the action plan, doesn’t happen for them.
Worth doing now: review how your practice identifies and codes patients with a learning disability, check your annual health check invite and recall process is catching everyone on the register, and make sure whoever leads on this has read the new guidance and knows what’s changed.