Developing good quality, culturally appropriate information about local services and sources of support for people with long-term neurological conditions

Local information

This section looks at how to develop, gather and provide relevant information about local services and sources of support for people affected by neurological conditions. It also provides some guidance on ensuring information is culturally appropriate. Guidance on assessing and assuring the quality of information can be found in Section One.


Consultation work carried out to develop this toolkit found that access to local information was one of the most important aspects for people affected by neurological conditions. It was also often the kind of information they found hardest to access through health and social care professionals.

In the 2006 White Paper Our health, our care, our say, the Government have proposed that all people with long-term health and social care needs, and their carers, should have an ‘information prescription’. It is intended that the information prescription will be given to people by health and social care professionals (for example GPs, social workers and district nurses) to signpost people to further information and advice to help them take care of their own condition.

This information prescription will need to draw on a common local information resource. There are various ways that this can be addressed (e.g. through a local directory on the web and / or on DVD or paper; through a local telephone helpline or by having an information resource person and /or centre). Some examples are given later in this section of how a few local areas have organised information provision to ensure the availability of local information.

There are three main issues about local information:

  • It must be kept up to date – ideally it should be checked every six months and a system needs to be put into place to ensure this happens.
  • It must be relevant to local service users and carers – they should be involved in developing whatever mechanism is used to gather and deliver the information and determining the content.
  • A common resource should be accessible to people affected by neurological conditions and the health and social care professionals they come into contact with.

We have developed a local information template which provides a guide to the types of information that people affected by neurological conditions told us they wanted at a local level. We have also provided a guide which suggests possible sources for this information locally.The distribution and availability of resources and support for people with neurological conditions is very different from area to area so it will be important for local stakeholders to identify, map and gather together the local picture. It is also important to gather information on referral mechanisms and criteria, if any, to sources of support as these vary from area to area. The local information template is intended to be used to start the process of developing a local information resource or to provide guidance on what should be built into an existing resource.

The Picker Institute have a good practice database where you can search through a collection of practical local examples of initiatives that have helped to improve the patient experience (including improving information and communication). Registration is free, open to anyone and very quick to do.