Children’s Learning Disabilities Forum: Raising Care Standards for Children and Young People with Learning Disabilities

With live events back, we will be kicking off the Children’s Learning Disabilities Forum with interactive icebreakers.

This session will allow you to get to know colleagues from across the sector and explore your key learning objectives for the day.

Expect lots of interaction and an opportunity to restart your face-to-face networking experience!

• Highlighting the impact of admissions to children’s inpatient mental health care on children with learning disabilities
• Outlining how strong community support can prevent admissions to children’s inpatient mental health care
• Practical guidance on how to improve community support for children with learning disabilities

In this interactive session you will be able to explore the steps required for holistic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic for children with learning disabilities. Ask your questions and hear our experts’ perspectives on:

• Identifying what support children with learning disabilities need as we recover from the Covid-19 pandemic
• Highlighting the areas in which children have struggled during the pandemic
• Sharing best practice for a holistic multi-agency approach to delivering support services

Great Ormond St are testing the use of a ‘communication toolkit’ on some of their wards, which contains communication resources for staff to support children who use different methods of communication to be involved in their hospital care and decisions.

• Outlining the resources included in the communication toolkit
• Examining the impact of the toolkit on children’s experiences and involvement in decisions
• Sharing best practice for examining and improving your organisation’s methods of communicating with children with learning disabilities

In this interactive session you will be able to explore workforce issues relating to services for children with learning disabilities. Ask your questions and hear our experts’ perspectives on:

• The workforce demands across different sectors that work with children with learning disabilities
• Sharing best practice for improving service delivery through staff engagement and training
• Examining the challenges in recruiting specialist staff, and the need for whole workforce training

• Examining the increased risk of mental illness in young people with learning disabilities
• Highlighting the role of social participation in reducing that risk
• Sharing the most effective interventions for improving mental health outcomes for children with learning disabilities

• Highlighting the role of cooperating with the local hospital NHS trust, the transitions team, and other health and social care providers to improve outcomes for children with learning disabilities
• Sharing best practice for keeping staff training up to date to ensure effective care
• Outlining the framework for community nurses to work with local GP practices to improve support for people with learning disabilities

• Identifying key transition points and the support needed to ensure positive outcomes
• Sharing best practice for implementing effective processes to manage transitions
• Highlighting the importance of working effectively across services and with external parties such as schools, universities, and employers

*Programme subject to change

• Sharing findings from research on parent’s and carer’s perceptions of English Children’s Services Authorities
• Highlighting the problems with taking a “one size fits all” approach to families of children with learning disabilities
• Practical guidance on the action required to move away from an assumption of parent-carer fault to improve service delivery