At Maudsley Simulation, we are passionate about improving people’s lives and addressing health inequalities through high quality mental health training. Working as part of Maudsley Learning, at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to work towards this mission every day.
Some of the most rewarding work we have done over the last few years has been training local LD workforces on the mental and physical health needs of people with learning disabilities. We’ve done this through our flagship course, ‘Meeting the health needs of people with learning disabilities’.
This one-day interprofessional course sets out how learning disabilities affect people, as well as related health inequalities, barriers to accessing healthcare, and ways to overcome these through reasonable adjustments. The training involves simulated scenarios, with actors with LD from the Baked Bean Company, and reflective debriefs to consolidate learning led by our skilled facilitators. We have an animation to explain our mental health training using simulation available here.
More recently, with funding support from Health Education England’s Intellectual Disabilities programme, we’ve completed a report detailing the longitudinal impact of our training on the health and social care professionals who accessed it. We found that this training can make a real difference to the actions and thoughts of professionals, and so the experience and outcomes of people with LD. You can find our full report here, our executive summary here and the easy read version here.
The main findings demonstrate that training participants were able to make changes to their clinical practice up to 12 months after the simulation course. The most significant of these changes fell into the categories of communication skills and tools, patient-centred care, reflective practice, and multi-disciplinary working, with reasonable adjustments featuring across these domains.
We’ve also highlighted the powerful impact and benefits of co-producing and co-delivering this training with the Baked Bean Company here.
For further information please visit the Maudsley Learning website or contact Chris Attoe at chris.attoe@slam.nhs.uk