Empowering people to co-produce their care

Hywel Dda UHB - The Learning Disabilities Dream Team

The Learning Disabilities Programme Group (LDPG) is a strategic group of service managers from Health and Social Care across the 3 counties of Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire. The LDPG were aiming to ensure meaningful engagement with people with learning disabilities, and had commissioned a Statement of Intent and a Model of Care and Support for the Region and invited 3rd Sector services to the meetings, but had not been able to get the views of people with learning disabilities to be meaningfully represented at these meetings.

A group of adults with learning disabilities, supported by People First advocacy services, met to decide how best to provide advice and support to the LDPG. They named themselves the Dream Team and this team has now evolved into a group of 10 people from across the 3 counties representing the wider learning disabilities population.

A number of approaches were trialled and failed to enable Dream Team members to fully participate in the LDPG meetings, due to the complex language used in discussion and papers, and the failure to involve the Dream Team in co-producing proposals. This has led to the present approach where the Dream Team leads alternate meetings of the LDPG, with the meeting chaired by a member of the Dream Team and the agenda and matters discussed led by the Dream Team.

The Dream Team have developed a Meetings Agreement paper which specifies how meetings are run so as to ensure that the level of communication is appropriate, that papers are produced in Easy Read format, that there are breaks during the meeting and that people are given time to be heard. The Dream Team have also developed a Charter to explain how they wanted the Services to be transformed.