Communication preferences
Information category:
May be held by:
Local Authority data is held by an upper-tier (U) or lower-tier (L) authority in two-tier areas
Contact details
Care provider
Local Authority (U) - Technology Enabled Living service
Private healthcare provider
NHS - Community Trust
NHS - Acute Trust
NHS - GP
Local Authority (U) - Social Care
Included in data standards:
Priority information for:
Content being added
Useful information for:
Comments:
(Needs editing to remove jargon) Under the Equality Act 2010, organisations have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that services are as accessible to people with disabilities as they are for everybody else. This duty only applies to people’s disabilities, but there is also a need to record other communication needs, e.g. the requirement for an interpreter and/or translations of written material if someone does not speak or read English. The NHS has established a Reasonable Adjustments flag, with an extremely detailed SNOMED-CT value set, to capture this information. If this is already populated in NHS systems it is possible to import it using the Reasonable Adjustments Flag API – and indeed it is a duty on NHS services, under the Accessible Information Standard, to share this information across health and social care if they have recorded it. It is unclear whether the Accessible Information Standard is intended to apply to the core business of local authority adult social care. However, it would make sense to provide for it in the design of the case management system, by including the functionality to import, record, flag and share Reasonable Adjustment flags. (Import functionality might be from the NHS via the relevant API, or from another internal system such as children’s social care, housing, or a corporate customer management system.) Systematic capture of people’s reasonable adjustment needs could also provide useful business intelligence about the needs of the wider population, for example, by identifying geographic clusters of people with similar disabilities or communication needs, which could help with demand management and forecasting or targeted interventions. Feedback from local authorities and system suppliers suggests that the NHS Reasonable Adjustments value set is far too lengthy and detailed for practical purposes, and is not fit for purpose for use by frontline staff. There would be merit in developing either a sub-set of the existing SNOMED-CT value set for use in social care, or a smaller and higher level value set which could aggregate the detailed SNOMED-CT codes into a more workable solution. (If this idea is pursued it must still be possible to import records containing the full range of SNOMED-CT codes to ensure full interoperability.) Other resources such as Experian’s Support Hub and whatweneed.support also offer useful lists of reasonable adjustment needs which have been produced by, or co-produced with, people who draw on care and support.