There’s been a lot in the media over the last few weeks about important issues impacting on people with intellectual disabilities and/or autism and their families and loved ones.
In no particular order, people have learnt that the atrocities suffered by vulnerable people in institutions uncovered back in the BBC Panorama 2012 documentary, Winterbourne View, are still happening. Last week Panorama broadcast another undercover documentary inside a hospital for vulnerable adults and reveals patients being abused by staff – Wharlton Hall. As I write, 10 members of staff have been arrested.
The latest annual report for the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review (LeDer) programme was also published earlier this month. The NHS has committed an additional £5 million funding to carry out more reviews in order to help save and improve lives by learning from best practice.
The Quality Care Commission also published an interim report on the Review of restraint, prolonged seclusion and segregation for people with a mental health problem, a learning disability or autism. This report was published early and has 5 recommendations.
There is an excellent BBC article here that summarises the woeful situation here that vulnerable people in this country and their loved ones face. There is another article here that gives facts and figures behind the transforming care programme that the government set up following Winterbourne View.
It’s impossible to pull out just one thing that is needed that will help improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and / or autism. We can’t just say workforce, because behind that is society, culture, and governance and finances just to a name a few. But our programme believes strongly that if we can ensure a caring and competent workforce for all, this will go a huge way towards enabling everyone to live a good life.
Taking all this into account, it’s great to be able to report some good news. The fantastic Stay Up Late charity is busy campaigning for truly person centred care for people with intellectual disabilities and autism. This includes helping people to live how they want to – for instance going out to concerts and away to festivals. We’ve already written about the wonderful (un)Ordinary Conference that we attended a little while ago, One of their ambassadors has written a blog about what it means to have paid employment.
It’s great to hear about initiatives like this and we know that there are lots out there, some of which our programme has been able to support. If you know of any good news stories please do share with us, we can publish the details here on our blog and help get the message out to more people!
Finally it was a very special time for our programme on Friday 23rd May. We had reached the finals of the Health Service Journal Values Award, in the workforce efficiency category. We didn’t win unfortunately but are very proud that our relatively small programme was recognised by the HSJ judges as being worthy of being put forward. We’d like to thank all of our stakeholders and our programme board for helping us achieve so much in the last few years. We are more determined than ever to “create a sustainable and secure workforce supply so that people can live a good life”.
Created by stakeholder for stakeholder
The HEE South Intellectual Disability workforce programme started way back in 2015, and at that time we start to be able to support our stakeholders to overcome there workforce challenges. For many of those early pilot project the work has be completed and every thing they did and learning has been shared via reports, easy read summaries (with all the associate resources ) freely available to everyone. We currently have resources covering the following subjects:
- Anticipatory Care Calendar
- Communication
- Community of Practice
- Deafblind
- Employment
- End of Life care
- Epilepsy
- Experts by experience
- Families
- Outcome tools
- Service redesign
- Training
In addition we also have more pilots underway covering other areas such as children and young people, health navigation, mental health, obesity, positive behavioural support, recovery colleges, simulation, transition and vision. If you want to find out who we are supporting, how to get in touch with them and what they are up to click here.
Make contact become a stakeholder
If you want to become a stakeholder and get weekly email updates click here.
If you want to get in touch to tell us what you think about this blog or any other related matters email us at SouthID@hee.nhs.uk .
If email is just not your thing you can also contacts on twitter @HEE_SouthID using the hash tag #SouthID, or via Linkedin
Workforce Development for & with People with Intellectual Disabilities 