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…]
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…]
The reasons that children engage in stereotypic and repetitive behaviours are many and varied, and it is thought that heir motivation to do so changes with the context. The researchers in this study set out to test the empirical evidence for this observation. They looked at interventions designed to reduce the behaviours and posited that [read the full story…]
Storytelling has a key role to play in a development and the extension of storytelling to people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) as an individualised activity, has been increasingly undertaken emphasising the sensory experience and the potential for social interaction. The authors of this study appear generally positive to the approach, although the [read the full story…]
A number of studies have looked at difficulties with overweight and underweight in people with learning disabilities. An added challenge is the issue of dietary assessment, where getting accurate information about the diet of people with learning disabilities can be difficult. The researchers in this study wanted to look at whether the use of personal [read the full story…]
Every year in England and Wales, a suicide occurs in roughly one patient for every thousand in mental health treatment. These numbers make it hard to research what mental health service providers can do to prevent further suicides, so it’s encouraging to see a new cross-sectional observational study published in the Lancet with funding from [read the full story…]
This large prospective observational study followed 1,635 chronically ill patients with schizophrenia for a 3 year period. The aim was to identify the best baseline predictors of recovery. Sixty-two factors were assessed as possible prognostic variables, including patient-reported variables, clinician-rated variables and medical record based resource utilisation. Here’s what they found: The likelihood of a [read the full story…]
