Treatment of continence in people with learning disabilities: 1

This article is the first of a four-part series which examines the continence-based needs of people with a learning disability. It considers the difficulty in defining learning disability as it is not a unitary phenomenon but covers a spectrum where learning delay is present to varying degrees. At best, the term is used administratively and therefore people with learning disabilities are those who are known to agencies providing services for such people. However, less than half of the total UK learning disabled population will not be identified as suffering impaired intellectual ability. So, even as an administrative term, learning disability fails.