By Dr Aoife Collins, Senior Health Promotion Officer, National Screening Service
We’ve developed disability awareness training for staff across our screening services. It’s part of our work to implement recommendations from our disability needs assessment research, and our work to improve equity in screening.
We want to ensure all our staff:
- have a better understanding of disability and the diverse needs of people with disabilities
- can break down the barriers for disabled people to access screening
- can demonstrate that we are a disability-inclusive organisation.
Developing the training
We’ve been working closely with disability inclusion experts at Ability Focus to develop and deliver the training, tailored specifically for our staff working across our screening services.
The training aims to improve how we:
- support our screening participants who have disabilities
- communicate effectively and appropriately with disabled people
- can ensure that we provide reasonable accommodations for disabled people who want to take part in screening.
Delivering the training
We’ve delivered four training sessions to date: one with our Access Officers, and three with staff across our screening programmes and departments. Almost 80 staff have completed the training.
The 3-hour session focuses on the three key principles of disability inclusion: awareness, empathy and clarity.
The topics covered include:
- what disability is and the diversity within disability
- appropriate and respectful ways to communicate with and about disabled people
- legislation, discrimination and reasonable accommodation
- exploring barriers that people with disabilities may face when accessing screening.
Stephen Kelly, Managing Director with Ability Focus said: “We really believe this programme can have such a positive impact on staff at the National Screening Service, by giving them greater confidence in how they support service users with a disability. Fostering a culture of confidence around disability inclusion in service provision can undoubtedly be challenging.
“The feedback from the training has been fantastic so far and each session has had such high levels of interaction. We feel the training is already starting to have the positive impact expected for staff when engaging service users with additional support needs.”
Staff feedback
We’ve received positive feedback from staff who have attended the training to date. Of the attendees who completed a post-evaluation of the training:
- 98% strongly agreed or agreed the training has improved their general understanding of disabilities
- 98% strongly agreed or agreed the training will impact positively on how they engage disabled people
- 100% of respondents said their knowledge now of ‘reasonable accommodation’ was good or very good.
What our staff said about the training
“Very informative training, I learned a lot of things I didn't know before and it will be useful in my personal life as well as work.”
“Thanks so much for the training. It will be very useful in my service-user facing role.”
“Great training session, very informative. I think all staff should attend this.”
‘Excellent, thought-provoking and engaging training session.”
Continuous improvement
This training is part of our ongoing work to improve access to screening for disabled people including:
- increasing health literacy about screening
- developing accessible materials about our four screening programmes
Next Steps
We’ll deliver more staff training in 2025 and are aiming to train the majority of our staff by June 2025. We will use what we learn in the training to review our processes to support disabled people to access screening.