Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that NHS nurses receive adequate training on learning disabilities.

National Health Service trusts have a statutory responsibility to provide sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent staff to meet the needs of the people using health services, including those with a learning disability. The professional regulators for nurses, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), set the standards and assess curricula for nurse education.

The NMC’s Standards of pre-registration nursing programmes state:

Approved education institutions, together with practice learning partners, must design and deliver a programme that supports students and provides exposure across all four fields of nursing practice: adult, mental health, learning disabilities and children’s nursing.

The Government response to the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review Programme Second Annual Report published in September 2018 agrees that health and care staff should have access to learning disability awareness training and will consult by the end of March 2019 on options for delivering this to staff. Mandatory learning disability awareness training should be provided to all staff, delivered in conjunction with people with learning disabilities and their families.