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We started off the month meeting up with the wonderful Paul Harris who is helping us to keep our presentation of Paul’s Story updated and relevant. We decided to redo the section on reasonable adjustments to include the video of the award-winning SPA project (Soothing Patient Anxiety) that Paul was a major part of when he worked at Princess of Wales Hospital. We want to ensure that students really understand and see what reasonable adjustments can look like! Here is the link to the video in case you haven’t seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDGeVPh42s
Mid-month we shared Paul’s story with a large group of first year nursing students at University of South Wales alongside Dr Stacey Rees. We have had some great comments from the students in their feedback including their understanding of the vital importance of communication with family and carers, the importance of reasonable adjustments, and to be aware of diagnostic overshadowing. We loved the following comment:
“Your story has touched me, and as sad as I am to have to hear it as part of training, THANK YOU for sharing it”
We also had our fourth trip this year to Wrexham University (online!) to share Paul’s Story. Thank you so much to Kate Young for facilitating. Since we started speaking at Wrexham in January, we have shared Paul’s story with over 180 students. In the last 12 months in total, we have spoken to over 1100 students in Wales!
We are delighted to be part of a group organised by Improvement Cymru that has met to discuss one of Welsh Government’s health targets which is to increase the uptake and quality of Annual Health Checks. Since April this year, these checks have now become mandatory for GPs to carry out for adults with a learning disability who are on the GP register. We urge everyone with a learning disability or if you know of someone, to check firstly that they are on the register then ask to have your AHC. The most important factor has to be the quality of the health check, which is where the focus of this group will be, and we look forward to keeping you posted on this campaign! Quality annual health checks really do save lives.
It was great to catch up with Jo Parsons from Drive Supported Living this month as we have wanted to do some work together for a while. We hope that in Learning Disability Week next month we will be able to join forces with themselves and Cwm Taf People First to discuss with their members the importance of going for an annual health check, and to discuss any reasons why people do not attend and how we can encourage more people to go!
Finally, we met up with representatives from Welsh Government, HEIW and others to discuss the launch of Tier 2 of the Paul Ridd Learning Disability Awareness training. Tier 2 is for people working more regularly with patients with a learning disability and covers all sectors including social care. It was a great meeting with exciting ideas and plans for the launch so watch this space!
Thank you for all your ongoing support.
From everyone at the Paul Ridd Foundation
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