This year’s Sexual Health Awareness Week is being run by Brook, who have a range of sexual health and wellbeing resources here, and its theme is ‘Breaking Barriers’. It aims to “amplify the voices of those who face sexual health access barriers” which we think is an admirable aim as we believe everyone should be able to lead the life they choose.
We have recently launched our own ‘Supported Loving’ programme, to train our workforce on how to support adults with learning disabilities, autistic adults and others we support with complex social care needs to have the kinds of relationships they want to have, whether that be platonic or romantic.
It’s no surprise that relationships are the most important things to most people, a fact over 95% of people agree with, and studies show that people with a learning disability and autistic people have the same aspirations for loving relationships as everybody else.
What may be surprising though is the fact that only 3% of people with learning disabilities in the UK live as part of a couple compared to 70% of the general population.
The training we’ve recently launched isn’t about providing simple answers for our customers, but about supporting them to have open conversations around their romantic and sexual orientation, what they might want from a relationship.
It’s also about supporting our customers to stay safe in relationships. We can’t protect anybody from having their heart broken, but it is important that we do what we can to ensure relationships are as physically and emotionally safe as possible, and that consent, contraception and protection from sexually transmitted infections is presented in accessible formats.
We’re incredibly grateful for the support of several partner organisations as we embark on this work, particularly Choice Support and Dhiverse for providing training for our Supported Loving team, and to all our team members for embracing this philosophy.
