The Green Light Toolkit

Practical new materials designed to help improve the quality of mental health services for adults with learning disabilities and/or autism, were launched today by the Department of Health, at the Learning Disability Today Conference and Exhibition in London. The new materials have been developed by the National Development Team for Inclusion (NDTi).

Families and people with learning disabilities and people with autism report negative experiences of mental health services. An earlier report by NDTi, (Reasonably Adjusted – published in 2012), described the reasonable adjustments mental health services were already putting in place for people with learning disabilities and people with autism. There were pockets of imaginative and positive practice by local services – but good practice was not common practice and there is little sharing or copying of good ideas.

As a result, the NHS Confederation, supported by the Department of Health, commissioned the NDTi to produce materials to help services review their own quality and share and replicate good practice. These were launched today by the Department of Health as the Green Light 2013 Toolkit, and include:

• An audit framework to support reviews;
• An ‘easy-read’ version of the audit framework and toolkit;
• A database of examples of reasonable adjustments made by services, as a resource for people seeking to innovate and share learning.

Sue Turner, Programme Lead for Learning Disability at NDTi said:
“The evidence suggests that many services are failing to meet their responsibilities under equalities legislation. By bringing together service commissioners, providers and people who use services to share issues and solutions, we have developed audit tools that are easy to start and challenging to finish. The aim is to help services continually improve. The materials are evidence–based, showing how local services have developed, and pointing out real-world opportunities and pitfalls”.

Ms Turner added
“By producing an easy read version of the audit we hope that local services will have the tools to help ensure that people with learning disabilities can be full stakeholders in the process”.

NDTi will be providing support to implement the new Toolkit and aims to develop a number of Action Learning Sets, incorporating a benchmarking club that uses the audit tools they have produced.