We are enthusiastic about supporting people with Learning Disabilities and Autism to live empowered, independent, and healthy lives, connected to their local communities.

Building on our experience supporting people with a Learning Disability in their own homes (in the community and via Supported Living, Extra Care, and Independent Living Schemes), our tailored support enables people with Learning Disabilities and Autism to develop and achieve outcomes, live well, and enjoy a safe and happy life.

Our bespoke support for people with a Learning Disability ensures their success, through:

• Our ‘total communication’ approach, which ensures that everyone we support, regardless of the way they communicate, is able to have choice and control over their support.
• Multi-disciplinary, inclusive support planning, involving family, friends, and advocates (as appropriate), to gather the bigger picture of the person’s life, while ensuring that their wishes, goals, and aspirations remain central to our support.
• Prioritising the person’s current skills, through our strengths-based approach, and looking to build on these through an ‘Active Support’ methodology. Active Support has been embedded in our Learning Disability services since 2018, with widespread success in improving life-skills, by breaking activities down into manageable tasks and building up to completing whole sequences.
• Identifying opportunities locally, to reduce social isolation, support skill development, and creating a supportive network beyond our paid support. Opportunities can include attending activities, volunteering options, and exploring avenues for paid support. We support independence in the community wherever possible, through travel training, and/or links with local taxi firms.
• Co-producing personal outcomes with the person and their ‘Circle of Support’ (family, advocates, friends), to ensure good health and wellbeing, and promote ongoing development.

We understand the importance of providing stable, consistent support, and so we ‘match’ a dedicated care team to our customers, based on their experience, life experiences, and personality. Our teams are supported through our Learning Disability and Autism training, mapped to the Government’s Framework, as well as a range of complementary training tailored to the customer, and a comprehensive induction.

Our Health & Wellbeing tools, including our Healthier Lives interventions, can reduce the risk of the shorter life expectancy seen in people with a Learning Disability, who are more likely to experience worse physical and mental health than those without. Our Health Overview Questionnaire, completed as part of daily visit notes, is a set of soft-sign overview questions, designed to help our system recognise deterioration in health conditions/wellbeing, which then alerts leadership/management where a customer’s health has dipped below their baseline, enabling us to respond immediately and proactively. Through this, we can:

• Detect subtle changes in a customer’s mood and wellbeing, enabling us to implement additional wellbeing checks or care as needed.
• Detect Urinary Tract Infections 4x more accurately.
• Identify 80% of hospitalisations 7 days before they occur, reducing these by 52%, and increasing the time between hospitalisations from 43 to 90 days.
• We also champion a healthy lifestyle, through the planning and preparation of nutritionally balanced meals, exercise (in line with customers’ wishes and interests), and support to access annual health checks.

Reducing Isolation

We supported brothers “Peter” and “David”, both older men with a Learning Disability, to significantly improve their physical health, emotional wellbeing, and relationship with their wider community.

Peter and David had found themselves isolated from their community, in part due to displaying behaviours that may challenge. Phillip and David had been barred from local shops because of their verbally abusive and threatening behaviours. The shopkeepers and their neighbours had requested that the Local Authority move Phillip and David from their family home to a Supported Living facility, which prompted the creation of their care package and our involvement.

Peter and David were initially resistant to accepting our support, lacking trust in people as a result of being barred/isolated from their community. We ascertained that both were emotionally impacted by community perceptions of them, which led to ‘self-stigma’ (defined by MENCAP as internalised discrimination/prejudice), which manifested/contributed further to a lack of confidence and self-care. This understanding enabled us to develop a person-centred trauma-informed approach.

As well as working with Peter and David, we engaged the local community through 1:1 meetings with people previously affected by the brothers’ behaviours. We acknowledged their concerns (whilst gently challenging/ strengthening awareness of Learning Disabilities), introduced ourselves and explained how we planned to effectively support the brothers to re-build community trust/relationships, overcoming negative community perceptions.

Upon visiting the brothers’ home it became clear that they had both been living in severely deprived conditions for years and had ‘slipped through the net’ on various levels, presenting safeguarding concerns including:

• Poor diet of cold food (no working cooking appliances)
• Minimal/unfit for purpose clothing
• Unsanitary and cluttered environment
• Phillip had pincer/curled and severely thickened toenails

We therefore put into place a series of outcomes for the brothers, to support their overall wellbeing.

The outcomes included:

• Improving living conditions to create a ‘home’
• Improving diet
• Improving personal care and self-management
• Accessing the community independently

We were able to support the brothers to access the community independently, through a series of small goals, building confidence through exposure.

These included:

• Planning and co-attending local shops (with staff), visiting charity shops for affordable clothing and supermarkets with ‘quiet’ hours.
• Rehabilitate community confidence image by arranging visits to shops they were barred from, with shopkeepers consent, at a convenient and quiet time. We engaged the shopkeepers for feedback. This successfully continued until the barring was (voluntarily) lifted.
• Strengthen community connections Co-attended community activities including bowling/dinners, providing new positive experiences to build self-confidence, self-regulation and friendships.

Keyworkers have now reduced their involvement to planning travel to/from the activity (through community transport/taxi).

To sustain motivation for both brothers, we encouraged them to obtain and complete journals. This enabled them to self-reflect and take pride in their achievements (supporting self-worth and confidence), and provide ongoing motivation.

Thanks to the input of our team, Peter and David’s behaviours that may challenge, a result of a lack of confidence and self-stigmatisation, have dramatically reduced.