In March, Sydney man Jack Kelly had a high temperature and was taken to hospital.
Key points:
- Research examined the hospital admissions of 92,000 people with intellectual disabilities
- It found they were being admitted to the hospital at a significantly higher rate than the general population
- Some conditions, such as epilepsy, had an admission rate 22 times higher for people with intellectual disabilities
Mr Kelly, 25, lives with cerebral palsy and intellectual disability, and resides in supported group accommodation, where a registered nurse is on call 16 hours a day.
When he had a high temperature, he was taken to a nearby hospital, where he spent six hours waiting in the emergency department to be seen by a doctor before being discharged the next day.
"Due to lack of training with people with intellectual disability, my GP and support workers were too scared, they didn't know what to do, so I ended up waiting in the hospital emergency system," he said.
"The issue is that in the night, my home is unattended by a nurse due to lack of NDIS funding, so I had to be hospitalised for something I should have been able to be treated at home with."
Mr Kelly said the trip was preventable, and he's not alone in holding that view.
People with intellectual disability are being hospitalised at a rate 3.5 to 4.5 times higher than the general population, according to new research published on Monday in the Australian Medical Journal.
Researchers are calling for urgent action to address the impacts of the lack of training and awareness within the health care sector on people with intellectual disabilities.
Supplied
)Julian Trollor is the chair of Intellectual Disability Mental Health and the head of the Department of Developmental Disability Neuropsychiatry at the University of NSW.
He said the biggest issue was admissions to hospital for conditions that could have been prevented through appropriately individualised preventative health care or early disease management.
"In our new research, we looked at the potentially preventable hospitalisations in over 92,000 people with intellectual disability in 2020 who were living in NSW at the time," he said.
"We showed that potentially preventable hospitalisations for people with intellectual disability were much higher than that for the general population.
"And there were particular types of conditions that were over-represented."
The new research showed that for vaccine-preventable conditions, people with intellectual disability were represented at two to three times the rate seen in the general population.
Admission rates for epilepsy were 22 times higher for people with intellectual disability, and admissions for dental conditions ranged between five and eight times higher.
"We found that essentially, the results reflect poor access to health care for people with intellectual disability, including poor access to preventative health care," he said.
Supplied
)Jim Simpson, the Senior Disability Advocate for the Council for Intellectual Disability, said this did not surprise him.
"I have been aware of preventable hospitalisations for many years, from listening to the experiences of people with intellectual disability and their families," he said.
He felt the biggest barrier to people with intellectual disability accessing inclusive health care was a lack of training within the health sector.
"Health professionals need training by people with intellectual disability who are the experts in their own lives, and can change the values and attitudes of professionals," he said.
In its interim report published in October 2020, the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability made a finding that there had been, and continued to be, systemic neglect of people with cognitive disability, including people with intellectual disability, in the Australian health system.
This finding was based on the lived experience accounts of people with intellectual disability and their families of interactions with healthcare professionals and services.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTA2LTE0L3Blb3BsZS13aXRoLWludGVsbGVjdHVhbC1kaXNhYmlsaXRpZXMtaG9zcGl0YWxpc2F0aW9uLXJlc2VhcmNoLzEwMDIwOTQxMNIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDAyMDk0MTA?oc=5
2021-06-13 19:16:29Z
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