This week was Neurodiversity Celebration Week (NCW), which was founded to help the world understand, value and celebrate the talents of neurodiverse minds. You can find out more about the week here as well as access a series of free online webinars which cover everything from the benefits of neurodiversity in the workplace, to neurodiversity for parents and carers and neuro-inclusive language and communications.
At The Advocacy Project, we help people speak up and make decisions about their health, wellbeing and social care. As part of this, we work with neurodivergent individuals and other organisations to identify health inequalities and reduce people’s barriers to healthcare.
Around one in seven people are neurodivergent, and it’s vital for equitable healthcare that processes and ways of working within the health and social care sector are considered from the perspective of people from this community. As NCW highlight when answering the question ‘what is Neurodiversity’, many of the ‘challenges’ neurodivergent people face are more to do with the environment and systems they are placed in, often designed by a majority population.
We work across the London boroughs of Brent, Hackney, Camden, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea where we help organisations and services improve what they offer by creating platforms for service users with learning disabilities to speak up and be heard, sharing their experiences of the services in the communities in which they live.
Our user involvement project SYNERGY is a speaking up group working in Camden. They’re an Advocacy Project team who use their expertise to help organisations make sure they are using neuro-inclusive language and communications in their outreach – jargon busting – as well as facilitating people to be involved in designing, setting up, monitoring and reviewing services. Meet the team and watch our introduction video HERE.
BBC News 2023: “The safety of people with learning disabilities in England is being compromised when they are admitted to hospital, staff are not equipped with the skills or support to meet the needs of patients with learning disabilities.”
With 1.4 million people across the UK living with learning disabilities, we know we need to step up and work to support the LD community to speak up for their needs. Find out more about how we do this here.
If you are living or working in any of these boroughs and think you could benefit from our services or would like to find out more about partnering with us in this work, then please contact our User Involvement Manager Natasha Lobo: document.write("