Tommy Jessop: Why I investigated hospital care for people like me (10 October 2022)

Summary

People with a learning disability are more than twice as likely to die from avoidable causes than the rest of the population. Actor Tommy Jessop and BBC Panorama investigated some of the stories of families who say they were let down by their medical care.

Content

Tommy Jessop is an actor and campaigner who wants to use his voice to make sure people with a learning disability are heard. He's known to millions for his role as Terry Boyle on the UK TV series Line of Duty. He also has Down's syndrome, which puts him among the 1.5 million people with a learning disability in the UK at risk of having their lives cut short by illnesses that can be treated or prevented.

For a BBC Panorama, he has been investigating the failures of healthcare which contribute to people with a learning disability having a life expectancy 20 years shorter than non-disabled people.

He found cases where disabled people were not listened to, where they were neglected, and where families had to fight for appropriate treatment instead of their loved ones being allowed to die.

Tommy says he has always had good care from the NHS but that's not always the case for other people like him.

An NHS report found that in nearly half of cases where a person with a learning disability died before the age of 75, the cause was a preventable or treatable illness. For everyone else, that figure was 22%.

Reviewing more than 3,500 deaths of people with a learning disability, the NHS found that in nearly a third of cases there was no evidence of good practice.

Tommy and Panorama examined thousands of coroners' reports from the past nine years. They also heard the stories of four people with a learning disability who had been affected by poor care.