Making it easier to ask for and get help

West Sussex organisations have been working on ways to improve how people with learning disabilities can access their services.

During a meeting of the West Sussex health and wellbeing board last week, councillors discussed a report from the learning disability partnership board.

The report included details from organisations such as Sussex Police, West Sussex Fire and Rescue, Age UK and the NHS, about how they had made it easier for people with learning disabilities to ask for and get any help they needed.

The improvements included simple things such as putting a flag on someone’s record which identified them as having a learning disability to working with them to find ways to make things easier.

Explaining why raising awareness was so important, Diana Bernhardt, the county council’s senior commissioning manager, said that life expectancy among people with learning difficulties could be 20 years less than people without.

Part of the problem was the likelihood that such people would have more health problems – but another part was the difficulty they faced in asking for and getting help.

Ms Bernhardt said: “Over 70 per cent of people with learning disabilities live out in the community without any real support packages in place and therefore it’s important that they can access mainstream services, particularly health services.

“People with a learning difficulty are more likely to die from Covid or have a bad experience in terms of the impact [the virus] has on them.”

Other procedures put in place to make services more accessible included hearing loops – a special type of sound system for use by people with hearing aids – and easy read information, which uses simple, jargon free language, shorter sentences and supporting images.

Sussex Police also has a Pegasus Card scheme which, with the permission of the user, can be shared with the other emergency service.

If the card holder calls the police, they say ‘Pegasus’ and a PIN number, which allows staff to call up their details and save valuable time.

The card can also be shown to police officers or emergency service staff to let them know the person may need extra help and support.

A spokesman for Healthwatch said: “We plan to take part in a national campaign next year, to look at the Accessible Information Standard which supports health services to communicate in a better way with the people who use them.”