Access to social care

Learning Disabilities

What we found out

We are from the University of Birmingham.

We have been working on a project called the ASC-LD project.

We have asked people with learning disabilities who are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic communities about:

The services and people who support them

How they feel about their support and the services they use

How services could improve.

32 people have told us about their support. They each took part in an interview.

We listened to what everyone told us in the interview to see what was the same or different.

ASC-LD

People told us about lots of interesting things. Some people felt differently about things and some people felt the same.

There were five topics that were important to the people we spoke to.

People told us about:

Their support workers.Most people like their support worker and think that they do a good job. Lots of people said it was important that their support worker was kind, reliable and treated them with respect.

Their culture.This includes things like food they eat, where they go, their religion, languages they speak and things they do around the home.

Their relationships.This includes relationships with family, friends, and people who support them.

Their independence.Most people felt like they were on a journey towards independence. However, people were at different places and the end of the journey was different for different people.

The things they do.People do a lot of different things. Some people were quite happy with what they do but others wanted to do more.

We held an event in November last year. We called it a Partnership Event.

Lots of people came to the event including people with learning disabilities and support workers. We told everyone about what we found out and we asked for feedback.

We also worked together to develop some resources. We called these resources the Tools for Talking.

The Tools for Talking are five short videos and five activities about each of the topics:

Talking about your culture and what it means to you

Talking about what you think makes a good support worker

Talking about independence and what is important to you

Talking about important people in your life and your relationships with them

Talking about what you do now and what you would like to do in the future.

The videos tell you more about what other people said about each topic. You can watch the videos by going to this website:

www.ToolsforTalking.co.uk

The activities are to help service users to tell people about things that are important to them.

We are now telling other people about the Tools for Talking. The people we have already told think they will help others. We are getting really good feedback.

We would like to thank everyone who helped us with this project. Without your help, it would not have been possible.