%0 Journal Article
%@ 1360-2322
%A Kenten, C
%A Wray, J
%A Gibson, F
%A Russell, J
%A Tuffrey-Wijne, I
%A Oulton, K
%D 2019
%F discovery:10074428
%J Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities
%K UK, children, hospitals, identification, learning disabilities
%T To flag or not to flag: Identification of children and young people with learning disabilities in English hospitals
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10074428/
%X BACKGROUND: Children and young people with learning disabilities experience poor health outcomes and lengthier hospital admissions than those without learning disabilities. No consistently applied, systematic approach exists across the NHS to identify and record this population. This paper describes practices in English hospitals to identify children and young people with learning disabilities. METHOD: Interviews: 65 NHS staff. Questionnaire: 2,261 NHS staff. Conducted across 24 NHS hospitals in England. RESULTS: No standardized approach exists to identify children or young people with a learning disability or for this information to be consistently recorded, communicated to relevant parties within a hospital, Trust or across NHS services. Staff reported a reliance on parents to inform them about their child's needs but concerns about "flagging" patients might be a significant barrier. DISCUSSION: Without an integrated systematic way across the NHS to identify children with learning disabilities, their individual needs will not be identified.
%Z © 2019 The Authors. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.