helping mencap and social services to educate a hospital on intelectual disability

this coming monday am going along with the UKs national intelectual disability charity; mencap, plus a buddy of mine-whose a fellow service user of the social services intelectual disability team... PLUS the intelectual disability team themselves to help educate a whole hospital on ID.
we both have severe communication impairments;his being much worse so it will be a challenge to get our views across,am going to be getting a new laminator this weekend hopefuly to make new symbols to help us and it will also hopefuly remind them that getting a book of symbols in every ward and making sure all frontline staff know about it shoud be a minimum;there is a book of symbols in accident and emergency but very few of them know of it.


cant wait to do this as have got a lot of history with the hospital;mostly bad though was born there thirty years ago to,when was born;they told mum was going to be a violent child because of the fact am red haired and they also said woud have a very low pain threshold,ahhhh the eighties.

UK learning disability awareness week

for UK learning disability [US definition=intelectual disability] week this year,am going to be going to an NHS hospital and training the hospital staff on intelectual disability,some are genuinely awesome and dont need training to understand us but the majority need a lot of training in many areas and who better to give them real world experience than those of us with it?

am going to be going along with the trafford ID team and a friend of mine/a fellow service user of the team, funnily enough-well it isnt funny actualy as will be in a lot of pain--am going to be in exactly the same hospital on exactly the same day early on, am having the usual general anaesthetic/day surgery treatment on teeth,getting them sorted out plus three of the little bastards have to be removed [theyre putting in special falsies at another date when gums have recovered-the falsies will be custom made to be epileptic and head banging safe,mum always did tell doctors at a young age they shoud have just whipped them out then-hers were all removed at twenty one,mine were damaged by severe dental fluorosis;caused by a brutal lifelong obsession with eating toothpaste ever since they tried washing ems teeth as a baby/toddler].
so am going to be teaching a load of medical people about ID [and hopefuly autism] on the job as well as dozing along to the conference

am going to be bringing up issues with nurses about how they communicate to us- they need to be talking to us not around us,and if they need to talk to our support staff/family/carers they shoud apologise to us and say we arent being ignored.

they need to have PECS books of adult friendly symbols available in every ward,not just accident and emergency, and even then not all staff know of it.

they need to be trained in makaton;none of them are.

they need to recognise we have a different understanding of pain,and just because we cant explain it well or show it well it doesnt mean we cant be greatly suffering.

they need to understand that severe challenging behavior is not an attempt at making the nurses lives difficult,its a form of communication from very desperate individuals who cannot express it in any other way.


am very looking forward to doing it as have got some MAJOR issues with that hospital.

world autism awareness day

the self and the SALT [speech and language therapist-she is in las vegas on holiday right now probably playing strip poker;paid far to much].....well em and the SALT have decided to put together something big for the organisation to host a world autism awareness day party sort of thing.

come on guys,not remember the date as well? world autism awareness day is 2nd April,as copied from google.


as the madam has selfishly fucked off on holiday have not bothered to send her the awesome plan have come up with,unfortunately as it has her name in it am not able to post it here otherwise woud be dragged into the office and told off no doubt like social services;learning disability team did for posting the truth about what happened to self in their residentials.

the plan am thinking of is similar to auttreat but obviously on a tiny scale,shorter talks and there being more interaction involved for the person attending as am wanting this to be able to appeal to all audiences-people of all ages who have nothing to do with autism as well as those who are autistic to any level,those who may have an autistic relative/friend and people who work with us.

have got various ideas for what talks they coud use including one that seems to alarm a lot of the autistic community-how the DSM changes will affect diagnosed or yet to be diagnosed autistics- if at all...a class on how to deal with offline and online hate crime & cyber bullying of autistics etc....and classes that coud help the community or people who work with interacting with those of us who are partly or fully non verbal; eg, a makaton class.
-have got a good list wrote down,and in fact that reminds,,,need to go boot up the craptop before going back to mine,and get the file emailed to SALT as our internet is as useless as david cameron.




is anyone else planning to do something for autism awareness day,or now the thought comes into head woud like to do something? 
will be very interesting to see what lydia@autismhoya does.
not interesting to see what autism speaks do as they will hijack anything to get their
autism epidemic claptrap across and thus encourage donations from the unaware.