Royal College of Emergency Medicine learning disabilities toolkit

This toolkit represents a major shift in attitude in how we approach children with learning disabilities in our emergency departments (EDs). There are over 1.5 million people living with learning disabilities in the UK, making up 2.5% of the UK population.1 Given many will have multiple comorbidities, patients with learning disabilities are more likely to attend ED and more frequently. People with learning disabilities face huge barriers to accessing appropriate healthcare and, as a result, are twice as likely to die of avoidable causes.2 The Equality Act of 2010 states that healthcare organisations and professionals have a legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments in order to allow people with disabilities to access the same healthcare as those who do not.3 The Learning Disabilities Toolkit was published by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and Dr Liz Herrieven, Consultant in Emergency Medicine (Sheffield Children’s Hospital). The aims of this toolkit are to improve clinician awareness of the needs of such an important cohort of patients in line with the findings and recommendations of the NCMD report.4 Included are important definitions, pitfalls and essential tools to allow us as professionals to recognise the inequalities present in modern healthcare and allow us to tackle these head on. Publication date: September 2024 Key stakeholders: Clinicians in the paediatric and adult ED, wider members of the ED multi-disciplinary team, general paediatric wards and other acute settings (ie, Paediatric ICU and HDU) (Box 1 and Box 2). Box 1 ### Important documents and previous guidelines