In response to ‘Day service cultures from the perspectives of autistic people with profound learning disabilities’ (Ned Redmore)

My name is Shalim Ali. I am part of a research team and have worked on different research projects. I am also an expert by experience with Choice Support. I write a column in the Community Living magazine, commissioned by Saba Salman. I have lived independently for 3 years.

My name is Andrew Power. I am a researcher in Geography at the University of Southampton. I am interested in the role of place in people's lives. I work closely with people with learning disabilities to find out about their support in the community and in care settings and think about ways to improve it. I met Shalim when we began our recent research project, Feeling at Home.

We were invited to write a In Response article by the journal to one of the papers in this issue.

We chose Ned Redmore's article (2023) Day service cultures from the perspectives of autistic people with profound learning disabilities for the British Journal of Learning Disabilities. We both saw Ned present this research at the Social History of Learning Disabilities conference in July 2023. We both found that it was a very accessible talk and clearly presented.

Ned's article is about how a good service culture can be developed in a day service for autistic people with profound learning disabilities. The service in the study is a local charity based in the North of England with 20–30 clients.

We chose to use the word client for two reasons. First, Ned used this term to describe people who attended the day centre. Second, Shalim also uses the term ‘client’ in his professional role as a quality checker in his reports and as an expert by experience in his research. We preferred this to ‘service user’ and thought that writing ‘people who attend the day centre’ every time was too long for this article.

Shalim also thought that the paper related well to his own experience of day services when he was younger. During this time, staff were practical, enthusiastic for the job, engaging, polite and valued what they did. Staff were also very diverse in ethnicity.

In reading the paper, we found out that the researcher Ned worked very closely with a day service client ‘Ben’ with profound and multiple learning disabilities. Ben is described as a 27-year-old man who communicated through vocalisations, direction and body language. He was provided support at home and 2-day services.

We asked Ned to explain why he tried to focus on Ben's experiences. Ned said that he wanted to try to understand Ben's experiences. He wanted to try and change his own views of the day service in line with Ben's. This would allow Ned to think about service culture in a way that was more in line with the way Ben viewed it.

We then asked Ned to explain how he developed this relationship. Ned explained that this was a process for him and it took time. When he first went to the day service, he looked at and wrote about the things that the day service staff thought were important. When he looked at what was taking place, he was focused on the service staff. His notes were about what the staff were saying.

As he spent more time with Ben he began to understand what his focus was. He saw what was important to Ben at the day service and what his views were. Ned's notes completely changed. He started to be less focused on what staff were saying as Ben was not interested in what staff were saying. Ben was much more interested in where people were, what people were doing and activities he loved. Ben did not like people talking to him directly so conversations were unimportant.

So, Ned began to work with Ben in a really intensive way. This helped him in his research in a way that was more appropriate for Ben, what he was doing on a day-to-day basis and his priorities.

The next theme we found important was the ways that a good service culture was developed by the service. In the interview with Ned, we found out four ways that the staff work well:

We also thought it was important to find out about the difficulties that the day service faced and how the staff dealt with these.

We finished the interview by asking Ned about his plans for the research. Ned said that he has been developing a tool for staff which shares good practice. We thought this would be a great benefit to other services. We thought that the themes that Ned covered in our interview would be good for staff to hear.