Health Facilitation Team - Learning Disability Services

Health Facilitation Team

The main task of the Health Facilitator is to advocate and facilitate to ensure that people with learning disabilities have access to primary and secondary health services in order to maintain their health and reduce identified health inequalities.

‘The Health Facilitator role will be vital in helping people with learning disabilities navigate their way around the health service’ (DoH 2001)

Enabling access to all health services
Identifying and recording health actions for the Health Action Plans
Identify and meet health education needs
Monitoring health outcomes through an effective review system
Supporting complaints or concerns
Reporting service deficits which limit health improvement

The key function of Health Facilitators in learning disabilities will be as educators. It is vital that advice and education is available, particularly for those staff within mainstream services who may have spent little of no time with a person who has a learning disability.
Maintaining the health of the person with a learning disability ultimately lies with the person responsible for their care. The Health Facilitator can provide paid and unpaid carers with education to increase their knowledge of health prevention and promotion and access appropriate health care.
The Health Facilitator will act as a bridge between specialist and generic services, and is in a good position to ensure that Health Action Planning and health is given high priority within the Person Centred Plan.
Health Facilitators will also assist in developing mechanisms to identify practice populations. They will work closely with Primary Health Care Teams to develop practice registers of people with learning disabilities and also feed into the country-wide Learning Disabilities Register when it is established.