My NHS research

Sharing best practice to support health professionals was a piece of research we undertook on behalf of South Regional Health Education England Intellectual Disabilities Programme. The objective was to make sure people who work in NHS trusts have the training they need to support people with learning disabilities.

About the project

Prior to the development of the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism, South Regional Health Education England Intellectual Disabilities programme commissioned NDTi to find and share best practice in training people who work in NHS Trusts to support people with learning disabilities.

We worked in partnership with people with lived experience (both self-advocates and family carers) to identify good practice examples of training tools and approaches and to explore what is needed to ensure learning is put into practice. We did this by:

• Reviewing the relevant evidence-base through literature searches and information requests.

• Conducting surveys and face-to-face online interviews with hospital staff to find out more about the content, format and experiences of learning disability training for the non-specialist workforce in the South of England region.

• Hospital visits to identify what training is provided to staff and what they need to help them put this into practice in their day to day work

• Undertaking an international consultation exercise to reach agreement on what is needed for good quality learning disability training for NHS Trust staff and ways to maximise the impact of this training.

• Exploring in more detail the important role of experts by experience in the design and delivery of learning disability training and how they can be involved well in the design and delivery of learning disability awareness training.
  
• Sharing good examples of learning disability awareness training through case studies.
• Running a workshop with a range of people from NHS Trusts and other partners, to discuss what needs to happen at different levels of the system to ensure that mandatory training on learning disability is making a genuine difference.

You can read more about the findings of each stage of this research here (all outputs have an easy read version).