Giving Voice to People with Learning Disabilities

My name is Jane Parr, and I work in Speech and Language Therapy, within Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust.

For Change Day 2014, I pledged to help as many people as possible to meet the 5 Good Standards for Communication for people with learning disabilities.

These five standards are:

1. There is good information that tells people the best ways to communicate with me
2. Staff help me to be involved in making decisions about my care and support
3. Staff are good at supporting me to communicate
4. I have lots of chances to communicate
5. Staff help me to understand and communicate about my needs.

We ran a month long campaign called Giving Voice to People with Learning Disabilities to raise awareness of the 5 Good Communication Standards. Giving Voice to People with Learning Disabilities encouraged organisations and individuals in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland to think about and improve the way they communicate with people who have learning disabilities.

The aims of the Giving Voice campaign are:

• To show how good communication helps people to have good lives.
• To help everyone understand the best ways to support people with learning disabilities with their communication.
• To get people to sign up to the 5 Good Communication Standards which have been developed by speech and language therapists. These will help everyone know the best ways to make communication better.
• To ask people who want to continue to help make communication better to join the new Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Communication Network – the group behind the campaign.

We were on radio and in the local paper. We asked people and organisations to sign up to the standards and we set up a network with communication champions to help us make a real difference.

In order to really start to make an impact on the quality of life of people with learning disabilities we have set up a communication network to take this project forward. There is still a long way to go but people with learning disabilities are fully involved in the network so their voice is starting to be heard.

You can find out more about the campaign and download resources from www.leicspart.nhs.uk/_News-GivingVoiceMonth.aspx.