Enter and view report

Healthwatch Lewisham visited residential homes with supported care and day centres for people with learning disabilities to assess if service users were being treated with dignity and respect, if they felt listened to and understood by their service providers and to see if services were person centred. Healthwatch Lewisham spoke with 49 services users as well as family, friends and carers and staff.

Healthwatch Lewisham were very impressed with all of the day centres and each one had its own qualities and quirks. Service users were clearly upset by the thought of the day centres being changed or closed, and a number of service users felt it would be detrimental to their health. Healthwatch felt that there were lots of areas of best practice including:

service users making a green-house out of plastic bottles

• a selection of life skills were taught and encouraged across the day centres including washing clothes and ironing, preparing meals, reading and writing clubs, current affairs clubs and activities around what you can buy from the local supermarket for an amount of money.
• some service users are clearly very talented at carpentry, arts and crafts. Examples were given of service users’ work being sold. Healthwatch feel that this could be utilised even more by hosting stalls at events and in shops or even online to sell their work
• At the tuck shop at one of the day centres, service users gained a lot of experience in preparing sandwiches, serving the public and managing the till and money.