All adults in Scotland have been offered their COVID-19 booster vaccination. 

This includes all adults and children aged over 5 with a learning disability in Scotland. For more information about COVID-19 vaccinations, please visit the NHS Inform website.

You can watch a video about how to book your vaccine booster appointment on the NHS Inform website.

Scottish Government advice

All covid rules and restrictions have been lifted in Scotland, but the virus has not gone away.

The Scottish Government recommends that everyone uses ‘Covid sense’ to help protect yourself and others:

• get your vaccine when offered to ensure you are fully protected
• open windows when socialising indoors
• wear a face covering in indoor public places and on public transport
• wash your hands to protect yourself
• take a PCR test and isolate if you have symptoms
• take an LFD test before visiting someone in a hospital or care home

Care for yourself and others to help slow down the spread of the virus and reduce pressure on our health services.

To find out more COVID-19 in Scotland, please visit the Scottish Government website.

UKRI ‘Coronavirus and people with learning disabilities’ study’

The UKRI ‘Coronavirus and people with learning disabilities’ study  was a year long project involving researchers and organisations across the UK to find out and report on how coronavirus affected, and is still affecting the lives of people with a learning disability, as well as their parents and carers.

SCLD was pleased to be a partner organisation in Scotland along with PAMIS and the University of Glasgow. SCLD helped to recruit participants for the study and convened an advisory group of people with learning disabilities, who helped to shape the questions. This group named themselves, the ‘COV Explorers’.

In September 2021, the findings from the last wave of the study were published.

The findings show that people with learning disabilities have done their bit through the pandemic to keep themselves and others safe: over 90% are double vaccinated; most are still wearing masks in public and getting regular COVID tests. However, more than half are worried about leaving the house, more than 1 in 5 are often or always anxious, or have had a new or worsening health problem.

Read more about the study and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with learning disabilities.

COVID-19 Guided Self-help Booklet Series

The University of Glasgow , with assistance from colleagues at Lancaster University, the University of Oxford and the University of Warwick, have published a series of guided self-help booklets developed for people with mild to moderate learning/intellectual disabilities.

The resources were updated in December 2020. You can access the resources online here.

Printed copies of the resources are available to people living and working in Scotland. You can order print versions of the series by filling out an order form and emailing admin@scld.co.uk.

The resources are due to be updated in the coming weeks – we will share via our social media pages as soon as the updated resources are available.

Other information and resources

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, SCLD worked with the Scottish Government and other organisations to produce and collate Easy Read information about and for people with learning disabilities on Coronavirus. Below we have provided a link to our Google Drive where you can access Easy Read information and resources.

If you have additional resources that you think we should include, please let us know via email.

To access the Google Drive information and resource bank, please follow the link in the heading ‘COVID-19 resources’ below.

Please note that much of the information in the resource bank may now be out of date. If you wish to access information and Easy Reads from during the pandemic, please click on the ‘Archive’ folder in the Google Drive. 

COVID-19 resources