Green Light Toolkit

The Green Light Toolkit - Overview and Trust Actions

To support the application of reasonable adjustments within adult mental health services, the Green Light Toolkit was first published in 2004 by the Department of Health.  The NHS Confederation was commissioned in 2012 to report on reasonable adjustments made within mental health services for people with learning disabilities and/or autism. This was completed by the National Development Team for Inclusion (NDTi) and published in the report Reasonably Adjusted? (NDTi, 2012). 

Whilst areas of good practice were identified, it was evident that “few mental health services have comprehensively and systematically audited their practice and redesigned their delivery arrangements to ensure that people with autism or learning disabilities obtain fair access and effective interventions” (NDTi, 2017, p.14).  Amongst recommended actions was the development of an audit framework for use in adult mental health settings, which resulted in the production of a revised Green Light Toolkit (NDTi, 2017).

NWBH is committed to improving access to our services for people who have a  Learning Disability, where this is reasonable and appropriate to presenting care needs.  Colleagues within our mainstream Adult Mental Health Services have fully supported the undertaking of Green Light Toolkit audits and contributed to the development of a Trust-wide action plan to further improve the accessiblilty of our services. 

 Actions delivered and ongoing to date have included:

• Learning Disability Awareness and Reasonable Adjustment Training - Have a look at our training resource pages and/or contact our local Community Learning Disability Teams (CLDT's) if you or your team would like to access some up-to-date training

• Autism Awareness and Reasonable Adjustment Training - Have a look at our training resource pages and/or contact our mid-Mersey Autism Service if you or your team would like to access some up-to-date training
• Improving clarity of pathways and joint working practices across specialist teams
• Improved use of the Electonic Record System (e.g. Rio) including Alerts and detail within the Care Plan - For example, the Practitioner Reference Group for Learning Disabilities are developing Accessible Care Plans (available in 2021)
• Easy access to accessible information - Includes accessible Mental Health Act information and a link to accessible information regarding medications are available through links in the sidebar
• Increased awareness and access to valid and reliable mental health assessment tools for people with a Learning Disability - Take a look at the Training Packs and Resources section
• Increased focus on Human Rights based assessment and planning resources (e.g. KMSAW) - You can find these details inthe Training Packs and Resources section

If you would like to be more directly involved in supporting further development of this work please contact the Care Collaborative leads and we would be pleased to provide further information.