Health needs

Policy rhetoric over recent decades has promoted social inclusion of the more vulnerable sectors of society, such as people with learning difficulties. This study aimed to describe the experiences of adults with learning difficulties in north-east England and their family and to appraise their care. Thirty-five people with a learning difficulty and/or a family member were interviewed. A model of social coherence was developed that moves beyond the self-limiting debates about social inclusion and exclusion.

Background: The inverse care law proposing that medical services are distributed inversely to population health needs, and that this law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, was first suggested by Tudor Hart in 1971. This paper considers whether an inverse care law can be observed for the provision of informal care as well as for medical care.

Aim: Using data from the 2001 census we sought to investigate the contemporary relevance of the inverse care law.

It is frequently asserted that the views of patients or service users should inform the structure and delivery of health and social care services. In the UK, patient participation, the expertise of service users and user involvement in the design and outcomes of research have been repeatedly emphasized as producing services which are more responsive, better coordinated and less stigmatizing. The NHS has highlighted the importance of involving service users in education and training. This article reports on user and carer views about learning disability nursing.

Around 6 million adults in Britain help and support family, partners or friends who are ill, frail or disabled. The care they provide is unpaid. They include over 1.5 million carers who devote at least 20 hours per week to their caring activities. However, most adults provide that level of care at some point in their lives. The UK, Scottish Executive and Welsh Assembly Governments have adopted strategies that aim to support carers in their caring role and enable them to continue caring for as long as they wish to do so.

This guideline covers preventing, diagnosing, assessing and managing dementia in health and social care, and includes recommendations on Alzheimer’s disease. It aims to improve care for people with dementia by promoting accurate diagnosis and the most effective interventions, and improving the organisation of services.

Background Menstruation has been shown to be problematic for many women with intellectual disabilities. There has been a greater focus on menstrual suppression or elimination than on help and training to manage menstrual care successfully. Method A cross‐sectional questionnaire survey was conducted in England to investigate the help and training currently given to women with intellectual disabilities. Results Twenty‐nine percent of the women had never been given the opportunity to learn how to manage their own menstrual care.

This article will describe and examine course feedback from a local training initiative, which contributes to the improvements in the health status of people with a learning disability, who have epilepsy. The aim is to analyse how an education programme that focused on epilepsy and its management, together with a borough wide epilepsy protocol developed the skills of the local workforce. This education programme provided a framework for social care staff, enabling them to work both safely and effectively in their support of individuals with learning disabilities that have epilepsy.