NHS England Learning Disability and Autism Forum

The Learning Disability and Autism Forum is a network of people with a learning disability, autism or both, their family carers and supporting organisations, who want to have a say in the work of NHS England and NHS Improvement. There are over 6000 people in the Forum. We connect with the Forum by email, Facebook and Twitter.

The Forum is run by the Learning Disability and Autism Engagement team who can be contacted by email engage@nhs.net

Forum members have taken part in many engagement events run by NHS England, and other ways to get involved in health and care are shared with the network. Forum members also have their own networks of people and organisations and pass on information and opportunities to get involved.

The Learning Disability and Autism Forum has had several engagement events of its own. Here are examples of these:

Letting NHS staff know you need support – February 2018

This event was about adding a note called a ‘flag’ to people’s health record to say that staff need to make reasonable adjustments. What people said helped this work to happen, and NHS Digital have been working to introduce ‘flags’ for anyone who needs reasonable adjustments to the way health services work so they can have fair access.

This is the easy read information we used to help make the event accessible to as many people as possible:

We also had plain English information for people who prefer that.

Complaints, comments and feedback – March 2017

This event was held in March 2017 and we looked at what it is like to make a complaint, a comment or give feedback on an NHS service for people with a learning disability, autism or both and families and carers.

We are using what we heard that day in a project called Ask Listen Do.