Health and care of people with learning disabilities

This report shows information on a variety of indicators including:

• demography
• health promotion
• body Mass Index (BMI)
• uptake of screening tests for example cervical cancer screening
• asthma, cancer and diabetes
• managing long term conditions, for example diabetes or epilepsy

You can use this information to look up data in the following ways:

• age band, gender and year.
• NHS geographic boundaries.
• disease prevalence.

You can use this report to compare health conditions or diseases between people with learning disabilities and the general population. This is often called prevalence, and is the percentage of patients who have a condition in comparison to the national average.

We collect this information because the law requires NHS organisations to monitor and improve the way they identify and support the healthcare of people with a learning disability. Recent research shows that often people with learning disabilities often have poorer health or have poorer experiences of healthcare.

This data is collected in an aggregate level from each GP practice which means individual patients can't be identified.

The publications used compare health conditions of people recorded as having a learning disability. The publications show 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 not recorded by their GP as having a learning disability.

NHS Digital received data aggregated at general practice level and did not extract any patient level data. The published data is further aggregated at Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) level reported against each indicator and in most cases split by sex and age categories.