Working with parents with Learning Disabilities

One of our centre managers, Kate, explains recent achievements.

A key area this year is our work with parents with learning disabilities. We have implemented many practice changes in this area that have enabled us to provide a more inclusive and meaningful assessment experience for parents with learning difficulties and disabilities.

This has involved placing more focus when families initially move in on how they like to be worked with, what they find helpful and unhelpful and which specific areas they struggle with from their point of view.

We have advocated strongly for psychological and cognitive assessments to be undertaken in a timely way at the beginning of the assessment process to help inform our ways of working with parents and allow more time to support them in a way that is helpful to their specific learning needs.

We have taken time and effort to adapt the information we are sharing with parents to make sure it is accessible, this includes pictorial guides to basic care tasks, simplified daily recordings with emoticons and pictures and easy read reports. We have been creative in how we deliver sessions and have adapted them to the needs of individual parents.

Importantly, we have also become more confident as a staff team in undertaking PAMS assessments. We now have three members of staff trained in PAMS and have completed three PAMS assessments in this period. This is something we continue to work on, particularly how we integrate the findings from PAMS assessments into our final comprehensive report.