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Letter: We’re improving services for adults with learning difficulties
I wanted readers to know how we have been evaluating services for adults with learning disabilities to find out how this group of men and women may best be supported to remain in their local communities.
The work has been carried out by CLAHRC (Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, funded by The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Among a number of different initiatives, we have established a service user advisory group (SUAG) of people with learning disabilities to inform the design and implementation of our evaluations.
The SUAG’s nine advisers bring a range of relevant experiences to the group, including different histories of contact with the specialist community teams, severe physical health problems and/or additional physical disabilities.
They may also have communication difficulties, mental health problems, and aggressive or sexually inappropriate behaviours that have led to their exclusion from services and/or contact with the criminal justice system.
All of them experience or have experienced loneliness, unemployment, social deprivation, exploitation, discrimination and marginalisation.
We all take for granted the networks and friendships we have established, and the importance of work and leisure activities, but none of the service users has paid employment or access to the opportunities that provides. They may also have difficulties travelling independently so their lives can be very restricted. The service users live in the community but are not part of the community.
For the tax payer, the cost of supporting men and women with learning disabilities can be very significant, particularly when services are for people with complex problems.
However, it is clear that these costs can be contained or kept at a much better level if the support that is made available to individuals with complex needs is person-centred, local, and designed round them.
Our work so far suggests that it is possible to design robust systems that can provide better support for adults with learning disabilities uniformly across the County and minimise the need for children with learning disabilities to be placed away from their homes.
I would like to extend my thanks to the SUAG advisers for helping us in our research and for all of those in the many different organisations we work with as part of this innovative and exciting initiative.
Professor Tony Holland
Adult Theme Lead
NIHR CLAHRC for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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J J Carter
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 08:02 PMThe £1000\day consultants have done well creating so many acronyms!
Gorgeous George
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 03:46 PMThese folk has been ever with us. I remember back in the '50s in London we had adults of restricted intellectual development playing out with us kids in the flats where we lived. We seem to be still fully occupied in "designing robust systems" to support them. Nothing will change apart from yet more research.
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