Reasonable Adjustments
Reasonable Adjustments in your healthcare
The NHS must make it as easy for disabled people* to use health services as it is for people who are not disabled. This is called making reasonable adjustments.
Reasonable adjustments are small changes that can help people with a disability or a long-term health condition to be treated equally.
It is your right to ask for reasonable adjustments.
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We understand that if you have a disability or learning difficulty, getting the right help in the NHS or social care might be difficult. But if we make some changes to help you, these changes can make things better for you.
These changes are called Reasonable Adjustments. If you need Reasonable Adjustments, we want to make sure that you do everything we can to make those changes for you. To do that, we need to know what changes you might need, as these will differ for everyone.
We would like to know if you need any Reasonable Adjustments and, if you do, what they are. We would also like to know if putting these on your records here at the practice is okay.
This way, everyone on our team will know what you might need. We also want to ask if it is okay to share our adjustments with other NHS or social care teams.
This will help them know what changes (reasonable adjustments) you might need when you see them. Examples of these could be:
- Using Larger text size in letters we send to you
- Allowing more time for your appointments
- Providing help for you to complete NHS forms
- Making sure you have a quiet place to wait for your appointments
- Adjusting appointments based on carer availability
- Ensuring space for an assistance dog
Of course, there may be other reasonable adjustments that would help you attend appointments.
Sharing these with other professionals who care for you can be important. For example, if you need space for an assistance dog and have an appointment somewhere else, they will know to have a room with extra space before you arrive.
Telling people about a problem can sometimes feel challenging. However, allowing us to share any reasonable adjustments means that you should only need to tell the NHS once.
As your needs change over time, so can your reasonable adjustments. For example, you might need a larger text size now, but in the future, you might prefer us to read things to you over the telephone or tell you face to face.
You can have more than one reasonable adjustment and change your mind anytime, and we can make more suitable adjustments over time.
