Working with families and people with lived experience Helen Toker-Lester and Michelle Beattie describe the key steps in developing relationships and working with people with lived experience, their families and their carers. They discuss creating trust, listening, aiming high, planning together, supporting staff, using individual funding and ensuring quality.

1. Working with families to
design solutions
Michelle Beattie and Helen Toker-Lester

2. Hello....
Michelle Beattie
Parent and a member of the
empowerment group
Helen Toker-Lester
ADASS Learning Disability
and Transforming Care Lead

3. A GOAL WITHOUT A
PLAN IS JUST A
WISH!....SO PLAN!

4. Key steps…
• Creating trust between families,
commissioners and providers
• Being listened to and listening to
others
• Aiming high
• Planning together
• Support staff
• Using individual funding
• Quality

5. Creating trust
• This can be hard if you have had
bad experiences…
• It can take time , but having
opportunities to give and receive
feedback is important
• Overall families need to be valued
• Their information is valuable and
important

6. Being listened to.. And listening
• In the past things have gone
wrong because people have not
been listened to.
• We all need to listen to each
other and act on it
•Designing the right
support needs
everyone to listen

7. Aiming High
• People have strengths and gifts. If
we know what they are it can
help a lot?
• It’s good to have dreams and
goals to reach.
•Planning together using
strengths and interests
makes good plans

8. Planning together
• Planning with the person and
those who know and love them is
important. At least one full day is
needed, with a person to lead
things and write it all down
• The “how to” part of the plan,
changes over time as we learn.
Time together to reflect and
decide what needs to happen to
make things better is needed

9. Planning together on the day
• Make it fun and positive
• Location, sounds, tastes lighting
matter
• Look at strengths and the whole
story
• Think about the qualities of the
people needed for support
• Think about housing, what type
it is , where it is
• Lists help!

10. Support staff
• Getting the right people to do
the right things is important.
• Getting involved in recruiting,
training, supporting and
appraising staff can help.
• Good providers will engage
people and those who know
them best in selecting and
training staff

11. Using individual funding helps
•People can have personal
health budgets, or direct
payments, or mixed funding
•Some people have used
individual service funds to
help
•Knowing about the money is
important

12. Quality
• We need to make sure that
support is of good quality.
• Sometimes things may not be as
good as we expect
• Everyone needs to know what
to do if things are not going as
well as we expected.
• Being part of, using and helping
the community is important

13. Unexpected surprises
The best plans are
flexible and change as
people grow
Keep the plan alive by
adding to it as you learn
together

14. Thank you!