Symptoms of physical ill health are sometimes mistakenly attributed to either a mental health or behavioural problem or as being a characteristic of the individual’s learning disability, and particularly when new behaviours develop, or existing ones increase. Given that people with learning disabilities have a much higher risk of experiencing a variety of diseases and conditions, it is vital that physiological or medical causes in behavioural change are explored and addressed as it could lead to poor care outcome and may even die unnecessarily if not addressed in a timely manner.
Individuals with learning disabilities often have limited access to health information as this can be compromised by communication difficulties, low expectations, lack of support, poor understanding of mental capacity and lack of reasonable adjustments by health services. Also, they very often rely on others such as family carers or support workers for help with access to healthcare, which can be poor if family carers or support workers are not well informed themselves or there is high turnover of workers in case of support workers.
