Seeing your doctor when you have a learning disability

---

Doctors can be really hard. It can be hard to tell strangers about your medical problems and reception staff are not always patient with you when you want to make an appointment. Booking appointments online can be too hard to do and an automated service is hard to concentrate on when you don’t feel well. When you have a learning disability writing and typing can take up a lot of energy. For me, waiting a long time in a queue is not ideal and often appointments are already gone when you get there. The music on the phone can make me feel worse. Waiting on the phone can take so long and for some people this would take up a lot of their support time which can be really frustrating.

---

When you get to see the doctor, being asked too many questions is draining. If we saw the same doctor we wouldn’t have to keep going over things all the time as they would be more familiar with how you communicate and your health needs. It can work better for people with a learning disability to see the same doctor.

Even if you get an appointment it can be really hard to get a good service if you have more than one health concern or if the health worker can’t prescribe what you need, so you have to go back again or buy your own medical creams. Medications are expensive and not everyone gets free medicine. Some things used to be free but now they are not, some people just can’t afford £12 for eczema cream because of the cost of living. Or they can’t afford £15 to stretch in warm water in a hydrotherapy pool because they are limited in how they can exercise.

It can be such a stressful experience getting a doctor’s appointment that it puts people off altogether. The system is not accessible and we get advised to complain, but when we do we get accused of being abusive. People assume that everyone has capacity to adjust their language in a heightened time of stress. The system is too quick to punish, label and exclude people rather than listen to them, rectify things and take the opportunity to improve the service. A person with a learning disability should not be bearing the burden of how stretched the service is. Nor should they be punished for missing an appointment that they forgot because they had no support to help them remember or because their appointment letter was not in Easy Read. Restrictions on when bus passes can be used make getting to appointments really hard or even impossible for someone with a learning disability. When things are this difficult it can make existing health conditions worse. More compassion and understanding is needed to recognise the frustration these things cause people