Making Positive Moves for learning disabilities

17 Jun 25

At HPFT, we are passionate about supporting people with learning disabilities to live happily and healthily in the community.

For last year’s Learning Disability Week, we were proud to spotlight our Making Positive Moves project, dedicated to supporting adults with a learning disability living in inpatient settings to move into their own homes.

This year, we caught up with the team to hear new, exciting progress.

Making Positive Moves

Making Positive Moves is a research study in collaboration with the University of Hertfordshire, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, Hertfordshire County Council and the University of Warwick.

It’s important that we understand how people with learning disabilities can live life to their full potential within the community, and how we can help reduce the risk of readmission.

To learn more, we spoke with people with learning disabilities to understand their experiences of moving. As a result, we identified four key foundations that support people to live well in their own homes:

Feeling safe
Belonging and keeping busy
Making their own choices
Feeling happy with who they are

We used these insights to design a model called ‘Building My Foundations – supporting a happy and healthy life in the community’. We believe that embedding this model in practice will help people to receive the support needed to live a good life after discharge from hospital.

Next steps

For the next phase of our project, we are excited to be collaborating with NHS England to produce a toolkit to support the use of the model.

Louisa Rhodes, Clinical Psychologist and Chief Investigator, shares:

“Since completing the research we have hosted a series of workshops to co-produce a toolkit which will support the use of the Making Positive Moves model in people’s lives.”

The workshops brought together people with lived experience, family members, carers, health and social care staff, advocates and other people involved in supporting adults with learning disabilities to live in the community.

“During the workshops, we were delighted to showcase three films which had been made by participants of the research. The films will help people to understand how the model can have a real impact on people’s lives.”

We hope to embed our findings into national policy and guidelines for supporting people with learning disabilities moving into the community, and to share best practice with key organisations, working together to improve care and quality of life.

If you would like to learn more, please visit the website.

Related Pages

Making Positive Moves for learning disabilities