Improving referral rates to online support platforms for carers of people with learning disabilities

Abstract

It is important to support carers of people with learning disabilities (LD). Carers of people with physical health conditions have benefited from online peer support, and it therefore likely that carers of people with LD would also benefit from this support. An online support platform for carers of people with LD was launched in an NHS Trust in June 2019, however the referral rates for carers have been consistently low. This project aimed to understand the barriers to staff referring carers to online peer support platforms, and to explore what would need to be done in order to increase staff referral rates. Semi-structured interviews with staff members in the LD Service were conducted, and a focus group also took place with the staff working for the online peer support platform itself. The interviews were analysed and a number of findings were reported, outlining staff perceptions of the service, what the current barriers were to referring and what could be done to improve referrals rates. Strengths, limitations and areas for future research are also discussed.Easy to read summary■This paper helps us think about how we can support people helping to care for someone with a learning disability. Some people have found it useful to get support on the Internet.■There is a website called SHaRON that can help people who care for someone with a learning disability, but this isn’t used very much at the moment. We want to encourage more people to use SHaRON.■We interviewed NHS staff who worked on the SHaRON website and staff who worked with people with learning disabilities to see what ideas they had to encourage more people to use SHaRON.■We outlined some things that could be changed to help more NHS staff remember to tell more people they work with about SHaRON.