BILD’s communication factsheet suggests that estimates of the proportion of people with learning disabilities who have difficulties with communication vary between 50% and 90%. For many people with learning disabilities, this communication will be non-verbal, or working at a pre-lingual level, which mean the use of many means including gesture, facial expression, sign language, picture [read the full story…]
Over 1 billion people on Earth smoke tobacco. WHO figures tell us that 80% of the smoking population live in low-middle income countries, most of which are not protected by any kind of smoke-free public health legislation. China is a particular black-spot in this regard. It has the largest tobacco smoking population in the world [read the full story…]
There have been a number of studies testing attributions of support staff and their impact on helping behaviour when supporting people with learning disabilities anf challenging behaviour. We posted about one such study in January this year which looked at the impact of using vignettes to measure helping behaviour and used Weiner’s theory to explain [read the full story…]
When we think of community involvement and participation in the 21st century, it is impossible not to consider the importance of access to information technology and the use of social media as key elements of this. The Rix Centre for example has worked over a number of years to improve access for people with learning [read the full story…]
Multi-sensory environments or snoezelen rooms are used in a variety of services supporting people with learning disabilities although there has until recently been a paucity of critical evaluation of their effectiveness. Although there are a number of examples in the literature of a wide range of positive outcomes when Snoezelen and non-Snoezelen environments are contrasted, there [read the full story…]
The late Jim Mansell recently identified the need for all of us supporting people with profound learning disabilities to ‘raise our sights’ in ensuring better quality support and subsequently better outcomes requires a significant amount of skill (see Raising our Sights) Projects like Mencap’s Involve Me offer a range of resources aiming to break down [read the full story…]
How is the economic downturn affecting the health of the nation? It seems obvious to many of us that the mental wellbeing of people who are going through very tough personal and financial circumstances is likely to be seriously affected. Of course the ultimate price that people pay is with their lives and there has [read the full story…]
Events that occur immediately before and after birth (perinatal factors) can often have a significant impact later in life. Research has shown that the risk of many mental health and neurological conditions (schizophrenia, ADHD, depression, autism and eating disorders) increases when complications occur around this time. However, there have been relatively few studies to date [read the full story…]
Self injurious behaviour directly results in some physical harm to an individual, or is where people display repetitive movements even though these may not immediately produce tissue damage. There is a hypothesis that in some cases of chronic self-injurious behaviour, the individuals involved may have altered or diminished pain perception. The researchers in this study [read the full story…]
We have posted previously about the use of active support which involves training staff in working practices and organisational procedures to improve levels of participation and increase levels of engagement in activities. The purpose of the current study however was to look at the impact of active support approaches on other outcome measures. The researchers [read the full story…]
