Oliver McGowan Autism & Learning Disability Training

We have rolled out the Government’s Oliver McGowan Learning Disability and Autism Training, which was made mandatory for all health and care staff through the Health and Care Act 2022.

The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism is named after Oliver McGowan, whose death shone a light on the need for health and social care staff to have better training. The Health and Care Act 2022 introduced a statutory requirement that regulated service providers must ensure their staff receive learning disability and autism training appropriate to their role.     

The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training is the standardised training that was developed for this purpose and is the government's preferred and recommended training for health and social care staff. 

Oliver's Training also supports the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan ambition by upskilling the wider health and care workforce to provide appropriately adjusted care for people with a learning disability and autistic people to reduce health inequality.

Together we can prevent the many avoidable deaths like Oliver’s from happening again. The animation below aims to help staff and employers across health and social care to understand Oliver's Training and why it is so vitally important.

The new Code of Practice supports the Oliver McGowan training and recommends a training package for all health and social care staff, as it delivers the “three tiers of capabilities” defined in Skills for Health’s Core Capabilities Frameworks. This training will mean that all health and social care staff have the right skills according to their roles to better understand and help people with learning disabilities and autistic people when they come into contact with our health and care services. This is important because research has shown that this group doesn’t get the same quality of care as other people do and, on average, die earlier than the general public.

The standardised Oliver McGowan training packages have been trialled and independently evaluated to ensure that they are “robust and high quality”. Continuing into 2024, NHS England is funding work to build capacity for delivering this training, with a current focus on “training the trainers”, including preparing people with a learning disability and autistic people to provide the online interactive and face-to-face sessions contained in Part 2 of the training packages. Currently, access to this Part 2 is limited although Part 1, consisting of an e-learning module, is currently being rolled out internally.

Bluebird Care Rushcliffe & Melton have worked in partnership with the NHS ELF system to link their training modules to our current eLearning platform, My Learning Cloud. All established care staff will be expected to complete this training over the coming months. New starters will complete the Autism & Learning Disability modules during their induction training and throughout the probationary period.

For further information click here.