Learning Disability Register

The Learning Disability Register – Is your young person on it at your local doctors?

Parents/Guardians please can you check with the young person’s GP surgery that they are on their Learning Disability Register. You may assume that you would automatically be on the Learning Disability Register, however, this has not been the situation, in a great many of cases. 

The hope is that the sooner your young person receives the vaccine, the safer they (and those around them), should be. It may also have the benefit of providing greater protection for the wider college community and hopefully a chance for life to slowly return to normal for the majority of people.

For anyone that is interested, please find attached a link to the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) latest guidance for GPs to follow.

Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) Learning Disability Register Guidance
The Learning Disability and Autism Programme of NHS England and NHS Improvement defines those with a learning disability as follows:

Individuals with a learning disability (internationally referred to as individuals with an intellectual disability) are those who have:

• a significantly reduced ability to understand new or complex information, to learn new skills (impaired intelligence), with;
• a significantly reduced ability to cope independently (impaired adaptive and/or social functioning), and;
• which is apparent before adulthood is reached and has a lasting effect on development.

Learning disability is different from a specific learning difficulty (such as dyslexia), or autism or a mental health condition.  Some people have all of these and also have a learning disability. (Courtesy of R Snow-Miller National Transformation Lead for LeDeR)

When delivering the COVID-19 vaccine, we must seek to make a judgement on each person rather than their specific diagnosis. Conditions which have a varying impact on learning disability, such as Autistic Spectrum disorders, require that a clinical judgement be made. The impact and particularly the need for support to cope independently, vary considerably from individual to individual. People with Asperger’s Syndrome typically would not have a significantly reduced ability to cope independently so would not meet the definition above, whilst others with more severe autism would.