March 15, 2017
In our last post, we talked about the awful treatment that people with learning disabilities can get in large hospitals, such as St Andrews Hospital, which was recently reported by the Channel 4 programme Dispatches. Now we would like to tell you what we’ve been doing to help make sure that people with learning disabilities from Oxfordshire don’t end up stuck in hospitals.
Transforming Care is a national programme designed to improve services for people with learning disabilities and/or autism, who display behaviour that challenges, including those with a mental health condition. This will enable more people to live in the community, with the right support, and close to home.
Two of the MLMC trustees – Paul Scarrott and Pam Bebbington – sit on the Oxfordshire Transforming Care Partnership Board as “Experts by Experience.” This means that they use their experience of having a learning disability and having used mental health services, to help design the best possible services.
Having people on the board who have learning disabilities, autism, or are family carers of people with learning disabilities and autism, mean that the approach will better meet the needs of people who use services.
It means that Oxfordshire’s approach starts with people, and we have designed a set of principles that will help keep this in mind as the Transforming Care process goes on:
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Our approach is all family, all age, holistic, and multi-disciplinary (everyone working together).
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Treating everybody equally doesn’t mean treating everyone the same (equity not equality).
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Growing the things that we have, that we need more of.
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Behaviour always means something (because it is always a form of communication).
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Better understanding and communication of care plans.
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Being positive about risk taking, but managing this well.
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Behaviour is not an illness.
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Autism is not an illness.
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Mainstream services should be person centred and meet individual needs.
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Co-production in development and management of services.
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Involving experts by experience in helping us understand and manage difficult/complex
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We don’t give up on anyone.
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We see the person, not the disability.
Sometimes the Transforming Care Board meetings can be long and technical. It is our job to remind the professionals of our principles, and that they are talking about things that affect the lives of real people.
We think it’s really important to be involved in helping the rest of the Board to come up with ideas, and to hold them to account. We will let you know how it goes as the Transforming Care process progresses.
