Co-created resources help patients with learning disabilities feel safe and supported

Northumbria Healthcare’s Community Learning Disability Team has received a grant from Bright Charity to support their quality improvement project.

The project focuses on creating a learning disability trauma pathway, producing guidance documents, easy-read handouts, and resources to help professionals provide the right support for emotional distress, disclosures of abuse, and trauma symptoms.

To ensure the resources were truly useful, service users were invited to focus groups and co-created the documents.

Funding was also used to pay service users for their time and expertise, as well as to create sensory bags designed to help reduce anxiety during the focus groups. Trauma assessments can increase emotional distress, and the bags include fidget and sensory items to help people feel calmer and more comfortable.

Community nurse, Lois Ainsley, said: “We think it’s really important that service users feel as relaxed as possible when attending sessions, especially ones that will likely increase anxiety and emotional distress, such as trauma assessments.

“Having access to the bags, which contain sensory and fidget toys, will be extremely useful to ensure that we can provide the most compassion and trauma informed care as possible.”

One service user said: “If you don’t want to talk straight away you can just chill out using the sensory toys. Sometimes you don’t feel up for talking but you know someone is there and it helps you get your emotions out in other ways.

“I liked being part of the group looking at the documents, it feels like people want to listen, help more and that I am important.”