Improving Health and Lives

The NDTi is also working with three pathfinder clinical commissioning groups to look at commissioning services for people with learning disabilities.

The project has been set up to support CCGs as they begin to commission community, hospital and specialist health services for people with learning disabilities. It will build on recent work to improve the care and provision for people with learning disabilities and enable the groups to share the learning with the wider clinical commissioning community. The three chosen CCGs are:

• A partnership between Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
• Gloucestershire
• Nene Commissioning

The NDTi is writing some best practice guides. The guides use the information gathered by the North East Public Health Observatory and the Centre for Disability Research at Lancaster University. Our local partners have early access to this information and help us shape the guides so that they can be used easily by commissioners and providers. The reports can be downloaded from the IHaL website and can also be accessed using the link in the Useful Info section below.

We are holding ten regionally based seminars to share emerging information and good practice this year. For further information please see the IHaL website. We are also working with established networks of good practice to maximize effectiveness and avoid duplication.

We held a conference on 16th March in London about ‘Making hospital services better for people with learning disabilities’. We shared an audit tool for hospitals at the conference. For more information, please go to the IHaL website and click on links to the South West Acute Hospital Review website. 

A further conference is planned for 18th April 2012 in Nottingham titled Access to Acute - Get It Right for People with a Learning Disability - Get It Right for Everyone. iHAL is working with the Access to Acute networ, Mencap and the RCN to put on this joint conference about improving hospital services for people with learning disabilities. Please see the flyer for more details.