About
Clear, understandable information is important to help you make decisions about your health and care and get the most out of services.
Since 2016, the Accessible Information Standard has given disabled people and people with a sensory loss the legal right to get health and social care information they can understand and communications support if they need it. But, is the standard being delivered by services and does it go far enough?
Your Care, Your Way aims to:
- Find out how well health and care services are delivering the Accessible Information Standard.
- Make sure that, if the standard covers you, you know your rights.
- Find out who else has problems understanding information about their healthcare and needs to be covered by the standard.
- Make sure more health and care services support people to get healthcare information in the way they need it.
Stay up to date
Whether you use or work for health and care services, if you are interested in supporting our campaign, please sign-up.
Who is involved?
- British Deaf Association
- DeafBlind UK
- Disability Rights UK
- Doctors of the World
- Healthwatch England
- Learning Disability England
- Mencap
- National Voices
- Patients Association
- Richmond Group
- RNIB
- RNID
- SignHealth
How to support our campaign
Join our list of partners
Do you want to join our list of partners formally supporting our campaign? Get in touch with our Policy and External Affairs Manager, Urte Macikene.
Urte.Macikene@healthwatch.co.uk
Share Your Care, Your way on your channels
Use our campaign toolkit to download key messages, social media copy and assets, website content and more.
We held a webinar to discuss findings
Wednesday 2 March, 3 - 4.30pm
To launch our campaign, we held a webinar to discuss:
- Our recent findings on accessible information, drawing on Freedom of Information requests submitted to NHS provider trusts and over 6,000 people's experiences
- Survey data and experiences shared with partner charities
- Information about NHS England's ongoing review of the AIS
- Barriers to implementing the AIS and overcoming them
Crystal Rolfe, Associate Director of Health Programme at RNID:
“It is vital that people who are deaf or have hearing loss receive equal access to health services, and the Accessible Information Standard is a key mechanism for making sure this happens. RNID has been working with the NHS and other organisations to raise awareness of the standard, to draw attention to where it is not being applied, and the resulting impact on patients.
“We strongly support the work of Healthwatch to identify the key issues facing patients and to make a set of recommendations which, if acted upon, will make a huge difference to patients’ experience with the NHS.”
Dan Scorer, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the learning disability charity Mencap, said:
“People with a learning disability are more likely to die avoidably and die far younger than the general population - often because of serious barriers to accessing healthcare. One of the key issues is making the reasonable adjustments people need to access healthcare, and research into the premature deaths of people with a learning disability has shown that people can miss out on the care they need when healthcare services don’t provide accessible information.
“The Accessible Information Standard was meant to ensure that disabled people received information in a way they could understand from healthcare services yet – despite 6 years having passed since the standard's introduction - research shows that this still isn't happening in many healthcare services.
“To tackle health inequalities it is absolutely vital that people are able to communicate with healthcare services and understand information about their healthcare, which is why Healthwatch England's campaign to fully implement the Accessible Information Standard is critical to the health and wellbeing of the 1.2 million people with a learning disability in England.”