Rix Conference Calls For Multimedia in Mainstream Practice
‘Out with paperwork and in with digital content, don’t fear the technology, train practitioners to properly support new methods of working and challenge attitudes at the highest organisational level.’ These were some of the answers surfaced by a Rix Centre led conference which considered the place of multimedia in the health, social care and education of people with intellectual disabilities and tackled the challenges of integrating it’s use into mainstream practices.
“We’ve been to these conferences before, we know that this is the way we want to work”” said Pete Russell, Head of Community Solutions for Community Lives Consortium in Swansea “It’s time to stop talking about it and make it happen, let’s get this stuff into our everyday practice, let’s not still be coming to conferences like this in a few years time talking about how we’d like to do it”.
Pete augmented his call to action with examples from his own successful experiences of mainstreaming the use of multimedia with the learning disability community in South Wales. He showed how digital camera footage has replaced the written daily reports in his organisation, challenging the way paper-based reports of service user’s behaviour can be generalised and misleading and freeing valuable staff time, which is better invested in contact time with individuals.
Dr. Karen Bunning, leader of the Allied Health Professions Graduate Training programme at UEA, highlighted the critical role of human mediation in the use of these technologies. Training and understanding is vital as educators, carers and support workers have the capacity to promote or cast doubt on the abilities of the individual. “New media cannot function in a vacuum” said Karen “the role taken by significant others appears to be critical to the success of new media in the advocacy process.”
The event on 23rd April was hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine’s Intellectual Disability Forum and attracted a diverse audience from a wide range of professions across the fields of Health, Social Care and Education.
Lord Brian Rix opened the day’s proceedings, which included contributions from Andy Minnion, Director of the Rix Centre, Ajay Choksi, Technical Assistant at the Rix Centre, Patricia Charlesworth, self-advocate and Chair of Hackney People First, Miles Leonard from Ellingham Employment Services, Prof. Steve Trevillion, Dean of the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of East London, Barnaby Harris from Robert Owen Communities, Kieron Sheehy, Senior Lecturer at the Open University’s Centre for Childhood, Nick Weldin, Artistic Technologist for Learning Disability, Sarah Persons, Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham University and Davd Elllis, formerly Principal Advisor to Adult Services at SCIE.
The day ended with a lively discussion between panel and audience and the mix of practitioners and academics found common ground around the call for these ways of working to be adopted and integrated into the way in which we work with people with learning disabilities across Health, Social care and Education.
