Hello everybody

Happy New Year to you all!!!

I just wanted to tell you that we have picked two new people to work in our team at the Learning disability Partnership Board office. They are small hours contracts (2 hours and 3 hours a week) and they are for people who have experience of using learning disability services. The jobs are until March 2011 and we hope that they will be a good introduction into what it is like to work in an office and also what it is like to work for the Council.

Northamptonshire County Council is the employer and the Human Resources Department worked very hard with us to make adjustments to support people with a learning disability to apply for the jobs.

We had easy read job descriptions and person specifications (this is a list of the skills you need to do a job). We have an easy read application form. We also had information sessions for people to come along to find out about the job and to get help with the application form if they wanted it. When the two people start work, I will ask them to write a blog to tell you all about how it felt for them!

The Partnership Board support officer, Lisa, worked really hard on making all of the forms and the interviews work for people and I would like to say a bit THANK YOU to her for doing this.

If you want to know more about any of this, please get back to me.
See you all soon
Dawn

Well Hello again, it’s Dawn and I am back. I wanted to tell you a little bit about a new project we are about to start.
Kettering General Hospital will shortly be advertising an exciting job opportunity for 2 people with learning disabilities and their support workers.
Each post will be for 5 hours a week for a six-month period and will be paid on a band 2 of the nursing scale. Each person with learning disability will be able to have their support worker employed on the same band by the hospital to support them in their new role, this means they do not need to find the money from any direct payments to fund their support.
The team of 4, (2 project workers with a learning disability and 2 support workers) will then be responsible for putting together a resource pack of information to help hospital staff provide better care to people with learning disabilities. Once the pack is ready the team will go out onto the wards and areas of the hospital to tell the staff how to use the resources.
It is hoped that this exiting and innovative project will raise awareness of the needs of people with a learning disability whilst providing hospital staff with tools to do the job!
This opportunity has been made possible thanks to a successful bid for funding from the Northamptonshire Learning Disability Partnership Board.
Further details can be obtained from Marianne Duffy, Strategic Health Facilitator / Acute Hospital Liaison Nurse on 01604 678135.
We would love to hear people’s thoughts about this project. We think there are different ways this could have been funded and if you can tell us about them we look forward to that.
Thanks for listening!
Dawn

Hello Everybody.
My name is Dawn and I work for Northamptonshire’s Learning Disability Partnership Board.

I am new to the world of blogging so any feedback you might want to give will be gratefully received!

I wanted to tell you all about what we have been up to in Northamptonshire to help us write our local employment plan.

We wanted our plan to be written by everybody (or co-produced) so we set up a group of people to plan an employment workshop. They were called the planning group. In the group we had people with learning disabilities (working with support) as well as staff from Northamptonshire County Council, Job Centre Plus and supported employment organisations.

This group of people worked very hard to plan the workshop which we held in September. Over 100 people came to the workshop and there was a real mix of people including families, people with learning disabilities, staff from hospitals, schools, volunteer centres and lots of other places.

At the workshop, we asked people two very important questions:
1. What is stopping young people and adults with learning disabilities in Northamptonshire from getting a paid job?
2. What can we do to make this better?

We also heard about the experiences of two people who have paid jobs at the moment.

We listened to what people told us and we used this to write our first plan. Louise did all the writing so we need to say a HUGE thank you to her!

The plan was sent out to everybody who came to the workshop to check if we had really understood what people were saying. The plan has been changed a little and next week it will be going to the meeting of the Partnership Board to see what they think of it. I’ll let you know next week how that goes…….

Our plan is full of things people need to do in the next two years and we are hoping to set up a group of people to check that the plan is really happening.

We think our plan is much better because we involved people at the start.

If you are interested in seeing the plan or understanding more about how we did it please let me know!

Thanks for reading – catch up soon!

Dawn

Welcome to Dawns blog on Real Roles. Dawn is representing Northamptonshire County Council.