Results: 119

For: caregivers

Parenting skills support programme effective for some parents, but must be tailored to individual circumstances

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Parents of children with learning disability and/or autism in seeking support with parenting skills, may have need of support with specific skills relevant to supporting their child with a disability.

Here, Kate van Dooren looks at a ‘pragmatic non-randomised’ study which evaluated a parent programme called ‘Riding the Rapids’ to see what happened to those parents who followed the programme.

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Confidential Inquiry into premature deaths WeLD Nurses tweet chat with authors and the LD Elf

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Following our recent post on what has happened since the publication of the CIPOLD Confidential Inquiry report, we joined a tweet chat hosted by WeLDNurses with two of the report’s authors: Pauline Heslop and Matt Hoghton.

It was a really lively hour with some fantastic contributions. Here we present a summary of the comments with some links to information that was mentioned during the chat itself.

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Equipping family carers with better information about in-patient assessment and treatment for people with learning disabilities

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We know that access to accurate information is crucial if people are to make good decisions about the support they get from services. If someone with a learning disability is admitted to a hospital unit for assessment or treatment for a mental health issue or in response to behaviour that is challenging support services, this can be a particularly difficult and confusing time for all concerned.

In her debut blog, Alison Giraud-Saunders, along with co-author Angela Cole, describes a booklet that she co-authored with the involvement of family members which has lots of key information on the law and people’s rights.

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Challenges in respecting autonomy in end-of-life care of people with learning disabilities

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Autonomy is defined as the freedom to determine one’s own actions or behaviour. It is a value at the heart of health and social care support and those supporting people with learning disabilities are constantly striving to maintain and indeed increase the autonomy of those they provide help to. The authors of this Netherlands based [read the full story…]

Established framework for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be used with some amendments for people with learning disabilities

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The psychological impact of abuse has been conceptualised as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but there has been little work on understanding whether this conceptualisation is appropriate and useful for adults with severe learning disabilities who may have limited communication skills. The researchers in this study set out to explore whether this established conceptual framework could [read the full story…]

BMA launches Mental Capacity Act toolkit for doctors, to raise awareness and support decision making

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The Mental Capacity Act 2005 came into force in England and Wales in 2007 to provide a legal framework for decision-making on behalf of people who cannot make decisions themselves. We have posted previously about the lack of practical knowledge of the working of the Act amongst learning disability community teams  and pointed to articles [read the full story…]

Social Workers get new practice guidance on working with people with learning disabilities with mental health needs

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Following the publication of the Winterborne View ‘concordat’ December 2012, it was agreed that the College of Social Work, in collaboration with other key groups and organisations, would produce guidance for social workers on good practice in working with people with learning disabilities who also have mental health conditions. The College of Social Work  is [read the full story…]

Support staff question research findings, professional knowledge or training if not from directly working with service user in question

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As you know, the Elf service exists to ensure that the best current knowledge is made available to support staff. It is possible to see from our tag cloud that we cover a good deal of material produced that relates to supporting people described as having challenging behaviour. We know that staff skills, competence and [read the full story…]

Alliance urges providers of support to people with learning disabilities to sign up to quality code

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The Driving up Quality Alliance is an alliance of people and organisations (listed below) committed to ensuring that the kind of abuse of people with learning disabilities uncovered at Winterbourne View can never happen again. They have developed a Code which they are inviting all providers that support people with learning disabilities to sign up [read the full story…]