Review of apps and other digital technology to assess cognition in older adults

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Sarah Gregory writes her debut elf blog on a clinical review in the Evidence-Based Mental Health journal about digital technologies for the assessment of cognition.

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An equal exchange? Practitioners’ accounts of social care assessment under the Care Act

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Tanya Moore considers a qualitative coproduced study of English practitioners’ accounts of social care assessment practices under the Care Act 2014.

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Empowering, personalised and recovery-focused care planning and co-ordination: When will we ever learn?

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Sarah Carr summarises the COCAPP mixed-methods study, which concludes that positive therapeutic relationships appear to be the most important factor in helping care planning and care coordination to be personalised and recovery-focused.

This blog also features an in-depth podcast interview with Professor Alan Simpson who led the COCAPP study, talking with Sarah Carr and André Tomlin about the research and it’s implications for mental health services.

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New guidance from SDCEP on the prevention and treatment of periodontal diseases in primary care

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The Scottish Dental Clinical Effectiveness Programme (SDCEP) has just launched its latest guidance on the Prevention and Treatment of Periodontal Diseases in Primary Care.  The focus of the guidance is on the prevention and non-surgical treatment of periodontal diseases and implant diseases in primary care.   It includes advices on diagnosis and management of periodontal and [read the full story…]

Recommendations for commissioning quality weight management services

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This guidance has been published and should be read alongside the Commissioning Policy A05 Complex and Specialised Obesity Surgery Services of the NHS Commissioning Board April 2013. It has been sponsored by the British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society, and is supported by a number of relevant professional bodies, including the Association of UK Dietitians [read the full story…]

More reliably user-friendly strategies to evaluate quality of life outcomes needed for people with learning disabilities

Analysis showed significant lack of robust evidence on impact or cost effectiveness

Measurement of quality of life for people who may not be able to verbally express their feelings remains a major challenge for providers of services to people with learning disabilities. Scores from self-reports of people with learning disabilities able to respond to questionnaires do not always match scores obtained from family members or support staff. [read the full story…]

Model of pain assessment in people with learning disabilities presented

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Describing pain is a difficult thing to do. Often we may feel our vocabulary is insufficient to capture what is happening in our bodies when we feel pain. A number of ways to help express pain have been explored, for example through the use of art. This was explored recently in a BBC radio programme [read the full story…]

Clinical guidelines for the diagnosis, assessment and physiotherapy management of contracted (frozen) shoulder

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Have you ever had a painful shoulder? Did it get better on its own? I have a friend, not another Elf, who had bilateral frozen shoulders. It was a most functionally limiting and painful problem. Fortunately intra-articular steroid injections saved the day and made a huge difference to both pain and function. If you have [read the full story…]

Conscious Sedation in Dentistry – guideline updated

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The Scottish Dental Clinical Effectiveness Programme (SDCEP) has recently published its updated guidance on conscious sedation in dentistry. The guideline was initially published in 2006. The aim of the guidance is to to promote good clinical practice through recommendations for the provision of conscious sedation in dentistry that is both safe and effective. It is [read the full story…]

Review finds no consistent definition of trauma and no reliable means of measuring its effects in people with learning disabilities.

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This systematic review looks at the literature on the effects of adverse life events or trauma on people with intellectual disabilities. The authors point out that there is a limited number of studies in this area and that effects of trauma seen in the general population literature are not necessarily transferable to the intellectual disability [read the full story…]