Living through the COVID-19 and Lockdown

View the session recording HERE

View the session recording HERE

About this Event

COVID 19 has been hard for everyone but harder for people with learning disabilities from Black and Minority Ethnic communities.

It is very important to hear the voices of people learning disabilities from those communities because:

• Information from the Government show more deaths of people with learning disabilities during COVID.

• But there are more deaths of people from BAME communities than we should expect.

• Research on All deaths from COVID-19 of people with learning disabilities 20% were from BAME groups.

• What this tells us is that more people with learning disabilities from BAME groups are dying from COVID 19 .

The Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities, Learning Disability England and SeeAbility say that:

• This is not right People should not have higher risk because they are from BAME groups.

• We wanted to find out why people with learning disabilities from BAME groups are more at risk .

• We wanted to find out what we can do better to protect people from BAME groups.

Where do we go from here?

We invited lots of people to talk about this:

• People with learning disabilities to find out what is going wrong.

• How people with learning disabilities are being supported .

• What people who offer support (providers) are already doing to help protect people from BAME groups.

• Learn from these examples of good support and tell others about it.

• We want to tell the Government and people that make the rules about what is good support.

Programme:

The day was co -chaired by Lola Young, Baroness of Hornsey, Member of the House of Lords and human rights campaigner ans Scott Watkin, BEM, Head of Engagement at SeeAbility.

We focused on two mains areas:

Listen & Think –where the voices of people who are from Black Minority Ethnic groups are heard.

Change & Act – an opportunity to share good practice and show examples of how we can work together.

We want to work together with people with learning disabilities and organisations to make change happen and make sure that everyone is kept safe in future.