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Meeting of the Parliament 24 September 2013

24 Sep 2013 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

New Learning Disabilities Strategy

McAlpine, Joan SNP South Scotland Watch on SPTV

Well, £250 million is a significant sum of money. It is important that the cabinet secretary has listened to what Enable Scotland and the Scottish Consortium for Learning Disability are saying and has ensured that the quality of the courses that are provided is improved. Colleges have an obligation to deliver equality outcomes. If colleges are not doing so, the funding council should be alerted to that, because everyone is entitled to an education.

On the keys to life strategy, I want to address the very alarming statistic that people with learning disabilities live on average 20 years less than the general population. I particularly welcome recommendation 11, which instructs

“the Scottish Learning Disability Observatory ... to develop a better understanding of the causes of unnecessary deaths”.

Of course, the reasons for early death are complex. People with learning disabilities can have, for example, very serious congenital heart disease and thyroid problems. In addition to major health challenges, learning disabled people may not in the past have received the treatment that they needed to address relatively minor health problems, which can, as a result, become major health problems. That can be partly explained by the difficulty in getting them the specialised treatment that they need. For example, how do staff take blood from a person whom they suspect is anaemic or is suffering from some other condition if the person is petrified of needles and lacks the capacity to rationalise the need to give blood? What do they do if a person needs an operation to improve their quality of life but is phobic about hospitals? How do they reassure a person who has difficulty in communicating their fears or describing their symptoms?

I have experience of families who have suffered from such problems. Twenty years ago nothing was done and such families were isolated and marginalised. Now we have specialist community learning disability teams, who have made an enormous difference to the healthcare of that section of the population. That is a result of the previous strategy.

I have direct experience of the Inverclyde community learning disability team at the Elizabeth Martin clinic, in Larkfield, and I praise the team, which has made an enormous difference to the lives of the disabled people with whom it deals. Consultant psychiatrists, psychologists, community nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, counsellors, multidisciplinary social workers, dieticians and chiropodists work together. It is important that people who have a learning disability have access to familiar professionals and continuity of care, in an holistic approach.

The delivery of medical care to some people who have a learning disability can be a slow process that requires an enormous amount of patience, understanding and flexibility on the part of health professionals. I know a learning disabled person who broke her foot and had to have it in plaster. The traditional way of removing a stookie—to use a good Glasgow word—is for the person to go to hospital and have it sawn off, but that would have been terrifying for the individual. However, the flexible support that the specialist nurse and physiotherapist could offer was such that the team was able to remove the plaster in the individual’s home. That is just one example of an advance that has been made.

I am running out of time.

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Meeting of the Parliament 24 September 2013

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