Who leads Green Light work?

By Sue Bridges and Peter Bates

In 2020, Sue sent a brief survey out to the UK Nurse Consultant Network, asking for responses from Nurse Consultants who were specialists in learning disability. Twenty five nurse consultants were members of the Network, of whom 13 responded. Here are the findings.

Green Light work refers to activities designed to ensure that autistic people and people with learning disabilities receive a warm welcome and useful interventions when they need to use mental health services. Most survey respondents retained anonymity, so it is not possible to be specific here about the details of their employing organisations, but there was a great deal of variation in the staff investment in Green Light work, as shown by the table.

If each of these staff worked fulltime on Green Light related activities, and if they were paid at the midpoint of the pay Bandings, then the budget assigned to leading Green Light work varied in this sample from £34,171 to £136,854, a fourfold difference in investment. The is much greater than the variation in public spending on mental health between areas, where in 2019 the most generous area spent almost twice as much per head of population compared to the lowest funding allocation (£220.63 compared with £124.48). It is hard to think of a justification for the fourfold variation in investment on Green Light work.

Two responses indicated that their Green Light lead staff also worked on reducing the number of people placed out of area, and suggested anecdotally that good Green Light work had enhanced the ability of the local service to support people who would otherwise be sent away. This shows the potential for Green Light work to contribute to the Building the Right Support agenda.

A further striking observation about this table is the variation in the grade of nurses considered to be vital to the task of leading Green Light work. In this small sample, the top role varies from Band 8c down to Band 6, and we might imagine that a number of other mental health organisations have not engaged a Nurse Consultant as lead, or indeed have no lead at all for Green Light work.