Manchester Community Adult Learning Disability Service

Learning Disability Week 2023

Learning Disability Week 2023

19-25th June marked Learning Disability Week and our fantastic CALDS (Community Adult Learning Disability Service) teams took turns ‘taking over’ the MLCO Twitter with intros, advice, infographics and more. Below we’ve rounded up the highlights from a great week of education and engagement…

Monday

The week was opened with our LD Occupational Therapists taking over. First were team introductions, followed by content focusing on myth-busting from an OT perspective and an interactive tweet about Reasonable Adjustments.

Text reads: How do Occupational Therapists support adults with learning disabilities to bust myths and live a more independent life? As OTs, we are passionate about empowering the population of adults with a learning disability to live a more independent and meaningful life. Using our initial assessment we work collaboratively with individuals and their carers to identify areas of their day-to-day life, which they might find difficult. We use a person-centred approach to create a goal plan that is tailored to each individual’s needs. - Addressing equipment and environmental needs - Identifying areas for skill development and providing intervention to support this - Supporting people to access meaningful activities both at home and in the community - Identifying sensory integration difficulties

Tuesday

Tuesday was the turn of our Speech and Language Therapy LD Team. Leading with an intro, the team went on to share quotes about why they love working as part of the service (please click through these in the slider below) before posting snippets of SLT-centric advice, top tips and some great videos — including an amazing sign language version of Aitch & Ed Sheeran’s ‘My G’!

Text reads: Making Reasonable Adjustments: TOP TIPS 1. Do you have ‘accessible information’? – patient appointment letters, treatment leaflets etc. 2. Does your accessible information contain images to help the person understand, particularly if they struggle with reading? 3. For people who struggle to understand written and spoken information, could you put easy-read visual leaflets together that help people to understand things like care plans, procedures, post-treatment care? 4. Could multimedia be used to support people to understand? e.g. a video about how to use specific health equipment or how to carry out a recommended exercise. 5. If you don’t already have multimedia available, could the person take a video of how to do the exercise on their own phone/ tablet, so they can revisit this when at home? 6. Use simple language and avoid technical jargon. Find out what word the person uses and use that! Let’s face it, none of us like jargon and acronyms!

Wednesday

Our Learning Disability Nurses got their thumbs moving on the Wednesday, sharing a number of tweets and videos that explored the week’s theme of myth-busting.

Thursday

On Thursday, we shared an informative resource that has been worked on collectively by professionals across the Community Adult Learning Disability Service. Using each letter of the alphabet, this A-Z guide offers expert advice on supporting people with learning disabilities.

 

 

Please click here for a PDF link of the A – Z [PDF approx 774KB]

Please click here to view a text-only version of the A-Z [Web page]

Friday

Rounding off the week was the CALDS Physios, who gave insights into the wonderful work they do and continued the theme of busting myths about learning disabilities.

Please click here to read more about the Community Adult Learning Disability Sevice

Keep up with CALDS on Twitter

View all of the tweets from #LDWeek on the MLCO Twitter