Communicating Skills to Help you Support People with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities

This course is aimed at helping staff to support people with profound and multiple learning disabilities to communicate and express their own thoughts and ideas.

The course content supports NISCC Standards of Conduct and Practice: 3.1 Empowering service users and carers to communicate their views, needs and preferences, taking account of their preferred language and form of communication; and RQIA Provider Guidance 2017-18 for Domiciliary Care Agencies; Compassionate Care; There is a culture/ethos that supports the values of dignity and respect, independence, rights, equality and diversity, choice and consent of service users. Service users are listened to, valued and communicated with, in an appropriate manner.

By the end of the course learners will:

• explore the implications of failing to understand communication and how this can result in a complex range of behaviours that challenge
• explore language and communication difficulties: Developmental/Acquired
• be familiar with the range of ways in which people communicate without speech
• have an introduction to Active Support, Intensive Interaction, objects of reference and sensory referencing
• have an introduction to augmentative and alternative communication; including PECS and basic Makaton Signs.