Kent’s Tizard Centre is working with creative arts company Heart n Soul on a new project that aims to improve health care services through co-design processes for people with learning disabilities or autism in London.
The Director of the Tizard Centre, Professor Chrissie Rogers, along with colleagues Dr Damian Milton and Beckie Whelton are to lead the research and evaluation arm of the project. It is envisaged this research will be creative, exploratory and will evidence everyday positive and challenging practices related to physical and emotional health.
Heart n Soul has been awarded Common Ambition funding by The Health Foundation and will run the project in partnership with the Tizard Centre, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Borough of Greenwich, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Inclusive Design and University of the Arts London (UAL) Creative Computing Institute.
Over two years, a range of activities will look to improve quality of listening, creating space in which people with learning disabilities and autistic people with and without learning disabilities and professionals can share experiences and decision-making, empower action around service redesign, and develop new ways of learning together. Evidence will be captured and shared, through web and audio-visual updates, the development of a comic book, and delivering video or radio events for professionals.
Professor Rogers said: ‘We believe that people with learning disabilities and autistic people with and without learning disabilities can thrive when they are at the heart of designing health care services. Empowering them to play a role in the development of health care services can improve their experiences and subsequently their physical and mental health. Ultimately, we believe relationships are personally nurtured and genuinely interdependent, they become authentic, meaningful and more care-based, producing ‘care-full’ spaces and relationships. We aim to carry out creative ways of seeing, hearing, being and knowing, to support and enable meaningful connections.’
Heart n Soul said: ‘Health care services can be difficult for people to navigate; they are even more confusing and overwhelming for people with learning disabilities and autistic people with and without learning disabilities (PWLDA). They often feel invisible, overlooked and unheard; many have negative experiences of health care, and very low expectations of their needs being met.’