About

This year is the seventh year that the NHS Benchmarking Network have provided comprehensive evaluation of trusts’ compliance with the national learning disability improvement standards for NHS trusts. The benchmarking project consists of 2 main collections this year:

1. Organisational level collection

   The organisational level data for the Learning Disability Improvement Standards project is submitted online through the NHS Benchmarking Network members’ area. It is completed by a nominated project lead, as well as other nominated staff members. The survey questions aim to collate data on policies and protocols within organisations’ activity, workforce and service quality.

   There have been a number of areas of focus for services provided to people with learning disabilities and/or autism over the last few years. These include: the ability to flag people with learning disabilities and/or autism on patient systems, demonstration of reasonable adjustments to care pathways, promotion of anti-discriminatory measures and ensuring people with learning disabilities and/or autism are empowered to exercise their rights.

2. Staff survey

   The survey allows staff members to give their views on their trust and delivery of care to patients with a learning disability and/or autistic patients anonymously. Trusts across England were provided with a unique URL link to distribute to staff members who had provided care for patients with a learning disability and/or autistic patients. The URL link provided staff with access to a survey hosted by the NHS Benchmarking Network, which consisted of a series of multiple choice questions.

   The topics explored throughout the survey include: the ability of staff to identify what reasonable adjustments patients required, the involvement of patients and family carers in how care was delivered, and whether staff had received the necessary training required to meet the needs of people with a learning disability and/or autism.

In previous years, trusts have also been asked to circulate a service user survey to ask questions relating to perceptions of the quality of care received by people with a learning disability and overall patient experience within trusts. Due to much shorter timescales to deliver round seven of the project, the decision was made that patient experience data would be collected centrally using patient focus groups, rather than a paper-based survey across trusts.

Who can participate?

This year the team will be running a benchmarking exercise across two different groups of participants:

1. LDIS for NHS Trusts

   All Acute, Community and Mental Health NHS Trusts can participate and submit data to the core project. This includes organisations that provide universal services as well as those that provide specialist learning disability and autism services.

2. LDIS for Health & Justice

   The team are also scoping benchmarking projects for a number of services within the Health & Justice system including Prisons, Liaison and Diversion Services, Mental Health Treatment Requirement Services, RECONNECT services, Immigration Removal Centres, and Sexual Assault Referral Centres. The specifications for these projects are still being reviewed and timescales will be determined as soon as possible.

Getting involved

LDIS for NHS trusts opens for data collection on Wednesday 22nd January 2025, go to the member’s area to register your organisation and start submitting your data, or click on the ‘data collection’ button at the top right-hand corner of this webpage. Data collection will be open until 7th March 2025. To account for the much shorter data collection the number of questions in the organisational level collection has been reduced. This year, participants will also not need to circulate a service user survey. Access this year’s project guidance here.

Timescales for the Health & Justice project will be confirmed in the near future.