Disability campaigners to produce guidance for social workers

Disability campaigners will produce guidelines for social workers on how to help service users become more physically active.

Disability Rights UK is producing the guidance after the charity found many disabled people don’t know what activities are available or what they can spend their personal budget on.

The organisation has identified that social workers can play a key role in discussing these issues during the assessment, supporting planning and review processes. It now plans to develop evidence-based guidelines that can help practitioners in their day-to-day work.

Leanne Wightman, project manager at Disability Rights UK, said: “We want to develop guidelines that are simply and easy to use for social workers. This would simply be about encouraging practitioners to ‘tweak’ their approach in order to start conversations about physical activity and wellbeing, with a view to helping them meet their support plan outcomes.”

The guidance will include information and statistics on the benefits of physical activity for disabled people, examples of good practice and advice on how to quickly source information about what activities are available for disabled people to access.

Disability Rights UK is now looking for social workers to help develop the guidance. Practitioners will need to give up an hour of their time in May, June or July to do an interview.

If you are interested in taking part, please contact leanne.wightman@disabilityrightsuk.org

The guidance is part of a three-year research project by Disability Rights UK, Sport England and the University of Birmingham on the different ways disabled people, especially those in receipt of personal budgets, can get more active.