A meeting with Cornwall Council’s Learning Disability Team CHAMPS prompted an enormous change in signage at hospitals across the county, including Bodmin’s.

Cilla Long, a Patient Experience Officer for Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CFT), met with the CHAMPS (Cornwall Health and Making Partnerships), a team of seven people with learning disabilities and autistic spectrum conditions, after discovering that they were having difficulty navigating clinical areas in hospitals.

Cilla worked with Ben Law and Nicky Jones from the CHAMPS to look at the current signage and to see how improvements could be made for those with disabilities such as learning difficulties, Alzheimer’s, or dementia.

Around 1.5-million people in the UK have a learning disability and it’s thought that up to 350,000 people have severe learning disabilities.

A learning disability affects the way a person understands information and how they communicate. This means they can have difficulty understanding new or complex information, learning new skills, or coping independently.

Cilla said: “I found it so sad, I was visiting a hospital with one of the CHAMPS when we ended up in the kitchen as he couldn’t navigate the hospital signs. He was distressed and extremely upset that he couldn’t do a simple task like visit a hospital, all because he couldn’t understand the signage.”

Soon after, Cilla and the CHAMPS spent time creating self-explanatory signs for a pilot at Bodmin community hospital. Cilla says: “We were guided where the CHAMPS thought signs should go and how they should look. We see things through different eyes, and we felt that the CHAMPS would be best to make these decisions. They were delighted to be so involved.”

Since the signage pilot, Cilla and the patient experience team have received significant positive feedback and are now fitting accessible signage into every hospital across the county.

“The pilot has grown. Each hospital provides different services, so there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach. We’re now having to expand our signage to cover all services and places of interest to match the hospital’s requirements” adds Cilla.

Zoe Locke, a patient experience manager for CFT commented: “Previously many people with a learning disability may avoid or miss appointments because of the anxiety surrounding finding the clinic or service within a hospital. We hope that the new signs will combat this.”

Ben Law from the CHAMPS comments: “The new signage is going to help so many people attend their appointments; they have already changed my life.”