Autistic people and people with learning disabilities: Service user views on Adult Social Care January 2025 – June 2025
How can we ensure that Adult Social Care services truly meet the needs of the people who use them? The best way is simple: by listening directly to their experiences.
Between January and June 2025, Healthwatch Brent undertook a targeted review to capture the independent views and lived experiences of recent service users—specifically focusing on autistic people, people with learning disabilities, and their carers.
Building on Ongoing Collaborations
This new report builds upon our extensive 2024 research conducted in partnership with Brent’s Adult Social Care (ASC) team. That initial phase focused on gathering insights from residents living with dementia, autistic residents, and those with learning disabilities. (You can read those foundational papers on our website at News and reports | Healthwatch Brent).
Following that work, the ASC team extended the project into 2025 to include an independent mystery shopping exercise, which specifically looked at the firsthand experience of residents and carers when calling the council's telephone helpline.
What Was the Focus this Time?
In early 2025, the ASC team asked Healthwatch Brent to check back in and review the experiences of residents and carers who had actively accessed services within the previous 6 to 12 months.
Our core goals were to:
- Provide an independent, anonymous space for residents to share their true experiences.
- Identify the specific, practical changes that would make the biggest difference to their daily lives.
- Highlight what really matters to service users and their support networks.
Real-Time Feedback for Real-Time Change
While maintaining our strict independence and user anonymity, Healthwatch Brent didn't just wait until the end of the project to share what we learned. Instead, we met with the ASC team on a monthly basis to pass on our ongoing findings.
This collaborative approach meant that:
- Best practices could be celebrated and shared across teams immediately.
- Urgent concerns and immediate ideas for improvement could be escalated in a timely manner, rather than sitting in a draft report for months.
The Impact: Co-production in Action
We are incredibly pleased to report that this ongoing dialogue has already resulted in a number of direct service improvements and structural reflections within Brent's Adult Social Care team.
Our final report brings together all the feedback gathered across the six-month period, presented alongside a formal response and update from the ASC team detailing the tangible changes and service delivery impacts that have already been put into motion as a result of your voices.
