Rachel’s Voice representation at Mencap Healthcare Inequalities Summit 2023

Our Director Caron Heyes attended the first Health Summit hosted in the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in April 2023. The event was chaired by the Duchess of Edinburgh, Patron of Mencap, with attendees including NHS leaders, Mencap Executives and campaigners from Mencap’s Treat Me Well campaign.

The summit heard about actions to improve life expectancy, avoidable deaths and other healthcare inequalities experienced by people with a learning disability; including goals to see everyone with a learning disability on the Learning Disability Register with their Doctor and the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism which is being rolled out to NHS staff swiftly.

Caron was invited to contribute to the discussions from a legal perspective and from her experience in representing families at inquests.

One of the points she was able to raise was an ongoing practice we see of learning disability being included on death certificates as a contributing factor to their death. It was a great indignity for one of our clients to sit through painful evidence of how her sister died as a result of injuries related to her physical frailty and be told that those injuries were contributed to by her learning disability. Her learning disability meant that she was unable to verbalise her experience and needs, and we were successful in our arguments in the coroner’s court to have learning disability removed from the certificate altogether.

We strongly feel that learning disability should never be listed as such because usually, it is the failure to accommodate additional needs presented in someone with a learning disability that contributed to the death than the learning disability itself, as Caron noted in her speech at the Summit.

One of the outcomes of the Health Summit was an invite from NHS England to contribute to discussions on issuing new guidance around death certification to ensure that intellectual ability is never considered as a contributing factor for someone’s death.

See more about the Health Inequalities Summit here