Why are People with Learning Disabilities Dying 20 years Earlier?

Look, this is a stat that genuinely keeps me up at night. According to the latest NHS LeDeR findings and reports from 2025, people with learning disabilities in the UK are dying nearly 20 years earlier than everyone else on average. What's even more grim is that a massive chunk of these deaths are completely avoidable, far higher than what we see in the general population.​

At Dr MJ's Harmony Haven, this isn't just some depressing number. It's literally the reason this place exists: not to just give someone a roof over their head, but to actually try and close that gap by combining proper residential care with real medical expertise on the ground.​

The problem: Diagnostic Overshadowing

One of the biggest reasons this health gap exists is something called diagnostic overshadowing. Basically, when someone's in distress or clearly in pain, instead of actually investigating what's wrong, people assume it's just "part of their learning disability" or "just their autism acting up".​

Think about it: a resident suddenly becomes really agitated, starts shouting or won't eat. In loads of care settings, that's just seen as challenging behaviour or a meltdown.

Staff get focused purely on managing the behaviour, using calming techniques or sometimes even medication to quieten them down. But what if that person's actually constipated? What if they've got a raging urinary tract infection? What if they're having a dental crisis or their blood sugar's all over the place? What if their "outburst" is the only way they can tell us they're in agony?​

This is where people with learning disabilities and autistic people get absolutely failed by the system, again and again. A physical illness doesn't get spotted, treatment gets delayed, and what should've been manageable suddenly becomes sepsis, pneumonia or something serious. And nobody's even asking the right questions.​

The acute medicine difference

Most care homes, they do their best, yeah? The support workers know the people they're looking after properly, they're often the first ones to notice something's off. But then what happens? You ring a GP, call 111, and often will end up calling an ambulance. And you wait. By the time a doctor actually sees the person, hours have gone by. Hours you didn't have.​

Dr MJ's Harmony Haven's being built differently. Medical expertise isn't just something you call in when there's an emergency; it's baked into how the place works. As an acute medical doctor, I'm trained to spot the early, subtle warning signs that something's going wrong, not just the obvious stuff. That means actually being able to tell the difference between someone having a meltdown and someone having a diabetic emergency. Or telling the difference between anxiety and the early signs of sepsis or a serious infection building up.​

Because medical and care staff are actually working together in the same space, questions get asked earlier. Is their breathing different from normal? Is their heart rate up? Are they eating and drinking like they usually do? Could their medication be causing problems? This is how acute medical wards work, but you almost never see it in residential care, and that's crazy when you think about it.​

Beyond emergencies: actually preventing problems

The whole point isn't just to spot things faster when they go wrong. It's to try and stop them going wrong in the first place. People with learning disabilities and autistic adults often live with conditions like epilepsy, diabetes, heart conditions, swallowing difficulties, things that need proper, ongoing management.​

Regular health checks, medication reviews, solid plans around long-term conditions, all that stuff helps catch problems early and stops unnecessary hospital admissions. When a resident's behaviour changes, you're not asking "How do we manage this?" first. You're asking "Could there actually be something medical going on?" That one shift in thinking can be the difference between an uncomfortable few days and a completely preventable emergency.​

And if someone does need to go to hospital, having a doctor involved properly means the clinical information gets across clearly. It means staff can actually push back if diagnostic overshadowing starts happening again in the hospital system, which it often does.

Actually making this better

The reality is, national bodies, charities, families, they've all been banging on about this for years: people with learning disabilities and autistic people are dying too young, way too often, from causes that absolutely could have been prevented. The numbers are horrific, but every single one of those statistics is a person whose pain wasn't noticed, whose illness wasn't taken seriously, or whose life was quietly shortened by a system that wasn't designed with them in mind.​

Dr MJ's Harmony Haven exists as a direct answer to that. It's a small, specialist home where medical expertise and proper person-centred, trauma-informed care actually work together in an environment built for purpose. So for families, it's straightforward: your loved one's not just going to be looked after. They're going to be understood as a whole person, properly.​

Because that's what it comes down to. We don't just care. We actually understand how their body works, and we act on it.

#SupportedbySkillSurroundedbyHeart