3.10 Involving people: Making sure IP is accessible to everyone

Information prescriptions offer an opportunity to help reduce health inequalities and highlight specialist voluntary and community support to help seldom-heard  groups to access health and social care services.

It is essential to provide information in different formats, to make sure you are meeting the wide variety of users' and carers' needs.  This requires a person-centred approach of being flexible, innovative, never making assumptions and working in partnership with local services who have the expertise to help people with particular requirements.

It is a basic aim of IPs to ensure that better, personalised information is made available to everyone, including people who have particular communication or access needs. All of the pilot sites sought to design their IP systems and the prescriptions themselves to meet diverse needs. When providing tailored information, you need to consider language, literacy, communication needs, age, gender, culture and beliefs, race, access to services and individual support structures.  These issues are not only of relevance to the person with the condition, but also their family and carer.

The sites focused, in particular, on the following equality and diversity considerations. We'll look at these in turn, on a separate page for each. We have included summaries of what the pilots learned, and case studies which provide valuable illustrations.

• Seldom-heard groups generally
• Disabled users, and particularly those with visual and hearing impairments and learning disabilities
• People with low self-advocacy skills, especially where this is associated with low take-up of mainstream services
• People with low literacy levels and who have difficulty understanding written materials
• People with mental ill health
• Black and minority ethnic communities and those without English as a first language
• Older and less mobile users.
• Location: making IPs available at the right places to meet people's needs.

'I wouldn't know how to turn a computer on but people say the Internet is such a great way to find out about things. It's good to know I could get one of these prescriptions and come to the library to find out more.'— service user

On the next page: meeting users' accessibility needs: those with general disadvantages