What we do
Involving you
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People we support influence the decisions that affect them and their involvement shapes our whole organisation.
Involving people we support is so important we have a specialist team to advise us. Our involvement team includes more than 40 people with learning disabilities employed to take part in our work. They help to:
- keep people we support safer and more aware of their rights and responsibilities
- improve our understanding of the communication needs of people we support
- commission an external independent consultant to carry out an annual satisfaction survey.
Their work extends to influencing and changing social care nationally through partnerships with many user-led and campaigning organisations.
It is a privilege to conduct the Satisfaction Survey for Choice Support. It has been strengthened by incorporating learning from past surveys, so that in future years we can add even more direct feedback through face-to-face contact with people being supported, their families and staff. Eve Hersov, Independent Consultant
Family contact remains a clearly important component of well-being for people being supported and this was born out in their comments. It is evident that good practice is taking place and the response to the Survey does suggest that some staff are especially pro-active assisting people to stay in touch. Eve Hersov, Satisfaction Survey Independent Consultant
We’ve helped people to tell us what they want in many ways, including checking, monitoring and guiding our services through:
- Quality Checkers - a team of people with learning disabilities and experience of support who are trained and paid to monitor services.
- The Our Rights Group, which represents people we support from across all the regions we work in. Its work includes organising our Big Meet conference for people we support.
However, large or small the decision, involving people we support means providing the right information in the right format. We strip down messages, simplifying them and making them accessible. This often means something different from one person to another, and includes using easy read literature, photos or Makaton to enable people to make a meaningful contribution.
An example of this is when we recently consulted people we support to create our new set of values. We checked carefully that the words we were using were understood by everyone. As a consequence people we support chose these four words to represent our values: care, respect, learn and lead.
We make especially sure that those people we support with very complex needs, who may find it harder to communicate, can contribute in a way that is meaningful to them. Read more about the latest campaign we are involved in which aims to improve services for people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) by creating a new set of standards. You can download the PMLD standards below.
