We have posted many times about the mounting evidence suggesting that people with learning disabilities are often poorly served by healthcare services. The recent Mencap report, “Death by Indifference 74 deaths and counting” drew attention to these continued failings in the NHS.

The General Medical Council has been working to expand and explain its guidance to doctors about supporting people with learning disabilities and has produced a website to assist in this. While we don’t normally post about websites, we thought that readers of WELD might be interested in this site for doctors, the result of the GMC’s work. We have to express an interest at this point, as the WELD team were involved in the project to develop the site, along with colleagues from Minervation and the Rix Centre.

The site is based around a series of scenes created to provide interactive learning opportunities. As the site suggests, the doctors in the scenes do a lot of things badly, but this is to illustrate potential poor practice and to enable users to learn by other people’s mistakes.

The site also identifies a range of issues relating to access to healthcare, provides lots of examples from people with learning disabilities themselves and has links to a range of resources.

Whilst aimed at doctors and designed to expand on GMC guidance, the site could be useful to anybody supporting people to access healthcare services.

Visit the site here: General Medical Council Learning Disabilities