How to use this toolkit
Through our research and co-production work, we identified four priority areas for improvement. These are:
- Priority 1: Fairness informed practice
- Priority 2: Decision-making
- Priority 3: Peer support
- Priority 4: Collaboration and co-production
Each section is structured around these key areas of practice, using the Think-Ask-Act-Repeat model.
Managers may focus on strategic planning, policy alignment, and team processes.
Frontline staff may focus on direct support, practice, communication approaches, and accessibility.
Not every question or resource will be relevant to every role, please engage with the content most applicable to your work.
If a section or statement does not apply to your service (e.g., if you do not provide face-to-face support), you can note this in your improvement plan.
The toolkit invites you to follow our four-step model to reflect on and improve your practice. This four-step journey looks like this:
Think
To improve the accessibility of your service, it helps to know what works and what does not. The first step is therefore to be informed.
THINK describes the lived experiences of victim/survivors with learning disabilities and the services who support them, as well as including examples of good practice.
Ask
The second step is to ASK yourself what you are doing well and where you could improve.
This involves completing a self-assessment. Here you will be presented with a series of good practice statements. You will then have the option to say whether your organisation delivers this good practice ALWAYS, SOMETIMES or NEVER.
Act
The third step is to ACT.
Once you have completed the self-assessment, the next step is to plan what actions you need to take to improve your service.
All the statements you responded to will automatically be transferred to your improvement plan, along with suggested actions you can take to make improvements. You can find your improvement plan under My account, or in the ACT section.
Repeat
The last step is to repeat THINK, ASK, ACT to ensure continuous improvement. Here are some tips on how to do this effectively:
- Give yourself time to implement your improvement plan before reviewing it. This might be 6-12 months.
- Make sure you have a monitoring system in place to measure your improvements so they don’t go unrecognised.
- Celebrate your improvements.
