A manifesto for the use of video in service improvement and staff development in residential services for people with learning disabilities

Accessible summary • Staff often influence people with learning disabilities when they talk to them and when they answer them. • For example, they might talk too quickly or they might use sentences that are too difficult. They might also miss what a person with learning disabilities is trying to say. • We think residential services should make video recordings of staff and people with learning disabilities talking to each other so they can see how this happens. • Videos could make staff better at offering choices and understanding what people think about things. • Making video recordings needs to be done carefully; staff and people with learning disabilities should be able to say they don’t want to be recorded. Summary In this paper we argue that video recording of actual practice should be a central tool for organisations attempting to improve services for people with learning disabilities. Since an important site for the disempowerment of service-users is in everyday, mundane interactions with service staff, an approach to staff development is needed which allows workers to see what they actually do and how they might do it differently. Research illustrates that retrospective self-reports of what people habitually do cannot capture much of the important details of communicative interaction. We argue that video recordings are the best way of doing this, and provide examples from our own work of the type of benefits that can arise. Finally, we set out a set of guidelines for the use of video recording in reflective practice in services.