In 2010, the Department of Health published Raising our Sights, Professor Jim Mansell’s report into services and supports for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities. The Government’s response was to broadly welcome the report’s recommendations and “its central message that the major obstacles to wider implementation of policy for adults with profound intellectual and [read the full story…]
Young people with learning disabilities with behaviour that presents a challenge to services will usually have significant and complex needs which present additional challenges for planning transition from support from children’s to adult services. The authors of this paper carried out a survey of all the young people, between 16 and 18 years of age [read the full story…]
People with learning disabilities have an increased prevalence of mental health problems compared to the general population, however, in the absence of an agreed model there is currently a wide variety of provision, including community and bed-based services. The Joint commissioning panel for mental health have produced a guide for commissioners to describe the current [read the full story…]
We have posted previously about people with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system and the work of the Prison Reform Trust in this area. Colleagues in the Prison Reform Trust are undertaking some research about provision specifically for women with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system. The researcher is carrying out a comparative [read the full story…]
The evidence on prevalence of mental health issues in people with learning disabilities is subject to some debate, as a result of methodological issues in the published studies. Despite these difficulties, there is agreement that the prevalence of mental health problems in this group is high. There continues to be debate over the appropriateness of [read the full story…]
Earlier this week, we posted about a study by Dr Tuffrey-Wijne and her colleagues which described the process of the development of guidelines to support decision making about disclosure or non-disclosure of bad news about life limiting illness to people with learning disabilities. That study was part of a broader programme of research that has [read the full story…]
In recent years, there has been a shift in clinical practice in relation to breaking bad news in favour of openness and the provision of information to patients. However, there is a small body of evidence that suggests that this shift in attitude has not impacted on people with learning disabilities, who appear still mainly [read the full story…]
The authors of this qualitative study were interested in looking at the experiences of growing up with a brother or sister with an autism spectrum disorder from the perspective of their siblings. What they did was carry out a number of semi-structured interviews with 12 typically developing adolescents who had a brother with an autism [read the full story…]
People with learning disabilities have been found to have increased risk of developing mental health problems. The knowledge of mental health issues amongst support workers however is also known to be sometimes lacking. The authors of this study were interested in looking at what support workers knew about mental health of older people with learning [read the full story…]
Research in the field of mental health has suggested associations between risky sexual behaviour and common psychiatric conditions, with higher than prevalence rates of HIV than found in the national average, risk of sexual coercion and high rates of relationship breakdown. The authors of this paper suggest that there are encouraging signs of positive attitudes [read the full story…]
