New project to improve learning disability care
A project that will bring together clinicians and patients with learning difficulties to improve care for people in the West Midlands has been launched.
The University of Wolverhampton has teamed up with Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) to undertake a 10-month project to learn about co-production principles and co-create with their respective patient communities.
The project will consist of a series of practical workshops with a view to redesigning and developing patient centred products such as toolkits and learning maps.
Lucy Palmer, learning disability specialist nurse at RWT, said: “It’s really important to have input from patients with learning disabilities in order for us to design appropriate services which are fully accessible to them.
"We have worked with patients before in terms of getting their feedback, but this is a further step forward towards improving our services and it’s been amazing to see how enthusiastic our patients have been in these workshops.”
Susan and Diane Baker from Upper Gornal, both learning disability patients, have been asked to help with ideas on how the hospital experience can be improved for them and in the past have trained nurses and staff to help them understand the needs of patients with learning difficulties.
Susan said: “We’ve worked on lots of materials in the workshops, working in groups, creating a map of the learning disability journey when we were in hospital – signposts and that type of thing, symbols that we are working on so that staff know we have learning disabilities - like a picture of a sunflower to help patients be more cheerful and to help staff know who we are."
The project has been supported by a £20,000 grant from RWT with focus areas selected based on patient feedback data from a variety of metrics including the Friends and Family Test, Complaints and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) National Surveys.
Alison Dowling, head of patient experience and public involvement at RWT, said: “The trust is always looking at ways in which we can involve our patients and their loved ones to help shape our services and learn from each other’s experiences, one of the fundamental ways do to this is through the involvement of co-design.
“We are really excited to be undertaking this piece of work collaboratively with the University of Wolverhampton to pilot the development and process of co-production principles for the trust.
"We will then decide how we could consider using co-production in four specific areas of the trust as projects for improvement, including an agreed action learning plan going forwards.”
Dr Martin Bollard, head of nursing in the university’s faculty of education, health and wellbeing, said: “I am very excited to be part of this project and look forward to working with colleagues and patients from one of our key local health partner organisations.
“Nowadays within NHS and Social Care practice, policy and research, co-design is an ideal way of bringing patients and communities together, with the ambition of developing equal partnerships to influence their care pathways.”
