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…]
The 2009 Bradley Review espoused a new approach to dealing with mentally ill offenders and those with learning disabilities to prevent this vulnerable group being caught in the revolving door of the criminal justice system. One of the recommendations was to develop awareness training for criminal justice staff and members of the judiciary to help [read the full story…]
Integrated care is seen as critical to delivering better quality services for patients and service users and a key element of health policies in the UK. However, the evidence base suggests a fragmented picture, with variations in definitions and implementations limiting what can be learned and applied elsewhere. This new report, Crossing Boundaries: Improving integrated [read the full story…]
The recently published guidance from the joint commissioning panel for mental health suggested that ‘there is no universally agreed commissioning model for mental health services supporting people with learning disabilities’ and this reflects an on-going debate about the structure and delivery of services to meet the needs of this group. The commissioning guidance suggests that [read the full story…]
In the wake of the dreadful events at Winterbourne view and the subsequent inquiries and reports, there is now a real push to consider the place of inpatient services for people with learning disabilities who present with complex needs and behavioural challenges. We have posted recently about alternatives to inpatient services, for example the Association [read the full story…]
Community Treatments Orders (CTOs) were introduced to enable people who had been detained under certain sections of the Mental Health Act 1983 to be discharged from the hospital and treated in the community. The supervising doctor however retains the power to recall that person to hospital if necessary The majority of studies into the use [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…]
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…]
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…]
