• Information
• Publications
• Children's resources
• Neurological centres
• Glossary
• Information Access toolkit
  • About the Toolkit
  • Overview of the Toolkit
  • How to use the Toolkit
  • How this Toolkit was developed
  • Information is important
  • Section one: Setting up systems
  • Section two: Providing a named contact
  • Section three: Information about local services
  • Section four: Information on managing a condition
  • Section five: Information about social inclusion
  • Section six: Assessing information needs
  • Resource Pages
• Communication skills project

A strong message from research conducted for this project and the research commissioned by the Department of Health for the Our Health, Our Care, Our Say White Paper is that people expect and want help and advice from health and social care professionals to help them find their way around the health and social care system and to understand the information they are given. They want support to access information and to use it effectively.

Background work for developing this toolkit suggested that health and social care professionals often felt ill equipped for their role as a provider of information and were not always able to deal with the concerns that people raised about their treatment and service options and particularly about the wider support available to them in the community. People affected by neurological conditions reported that they stumbled upon information about valuable sources of support sometimes many years after a diagnosis of a long-term condition and wondered why they had not been given more information by the health and social care professionals they had been in contact with.

People affected by neurological conditions are often under the care of a specialist, but they may have very infrequent contact with a specialist service. It is important, therefore, that sources of relevant information and support are available widely in community, social and primary care settings where this group of people are likely to be accessing services and seeking information most of the time. The toolkit is intended to support neuro-specialist services to provide information about more generic community and social support services and to enable primary and community care practitioners to better direct people with neurological conditions to the sources of help and information that they seek, including specialist support.

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