Publication, Part of Health and Care of People with Learning Disabilities

Health and Care of People with Learning Disabilities Experimental Statistics 2020 to 2021

Experimental statistics, Other reports and statistics, Official statistics in development

Publication Date:: 9 Dec 2021
Geographic Coverage:: England
Geographical Granularity:: Regions, Sub-Integrated Care Boards
Date Range:: 01 Apr 2015 to 31 Mar 2020

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Data Coverage

Summary

The outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to unprecedented changes in the work and behaviour of GP practices and consequently the data in this publication may have been impacted, including indicators and contextual data from patients registered at a GP Practice.

The data is extracted through the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) therefore the burden of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has not affected the collection of data for this publication.

Caution should be taken in drawing any conclusions from this data without due consideration of the circumstances both locally and nationally as of 1 January 2020 and NHS Digital would recommend that any use of this data is accompanied by an appropriate caveat.

Revised indicators in this publication are not comparable with previous versions due to a change in the indicator definitions.

• Two indicators for Colorectal Screening indicators were replaced due to a change in criteria.

• Two indicators for Palliative Care indicators were replaced due to a change in criteria.

• Eighteen indicators new indicators were introduced, fourteen of which relate to patients with Autism.

More information on these changes can be found in the Data Quality section of this publication.

The aim of this publication is to provide information about the key differences in healthcare between people with a learning disability and those without. It contains aggregated data on key health issues for people who are recorded by their GP as having a learning disability, and comparative data about a control group who are recorded by their GP as not having a learning disability.

Data has been collected from participating practices using EMIS, Cegedim Healthcare Systems (formerly Vision) and EVA Health Technologies (formerly Microtest) GP systems.

Please note: on 6 January 2021, the Health and Care of People with Learning Disabilities 2016-17 to 2020-21: CCG coverage.csv has been updated to include the numerator and denominator used to calculate the coverage. this is in addition to the previous content which remains unchanged.

Highlights

England, 2020-21

Coverage

56.0% of patients registered in England in 2020-21 were included in this publication.

Learning Disability Prevalence

0.5% of the patients included in this publication were recorded by their GP as having a learning disability in 2020-21.

Health Checks

75.2% of patients with a learning disability had a Learning Disability Health Check in 2020-21, a statistically significant increase from 56.3% in 2016-17.

Breast Cancer Screening

The percentage of female patients aged 50 to 69 who had a breast cancer screening test decreased in both cohorts between 2016-17 and 2020-21. For patients without a learning disability this fell by 1.6 percentage points and those with a learning disability by 1.3 percentage points.

Autism

The percentage of patients who had a learning disability and have been diagnosed with Autism had a statistically significant increase each year from 19.8% in 2016-17 to 28.6% in 2020-21.

The percentage of patients without a learning disability who have a diagnosis of Autism has increased by less than 1 percentage point over the same period.

Prescribing

The percentage of patients with a learning disability who were prescribed antipsychotics decreased each year between 2016-17 (15.7%) and 2020-21 (14.8%), with a statistically significant decrease between 2016-17 and 2020-21.

Patients without a learning disability who were prescribed antipsychotics has remained stable at 0.9% over the same period.

The percentage of patients with a learning disability who were prescribed benzodiazepines decreased each year between 2016-17 (7.9%) and 2020-21 (7.3%), with a statistically significant decrease between 2016-17 and 2020-21.

Patients without a learning disability who were prescribed benzodiazepines mirrored this pattern over the same period.

For the first time since 2016-17, the percentage of patients with a learning disability who were prescribed epilepsy drugs without an active diagnosis of epilepsy decreased from 5.6% in 2019-20 to 4.9% in 2020-21.

The percentage of patients without a learning disability who were prescribed epilepsy drugs without a diagnosis of epilepsy decreased from 2.4% in 2019-20 to 2.3% in 2020-21.