We have posted many times about the mounting evidence suggesting that people with learning disabilities are often poorly served by healthcare services. The recent Mencap report, “Death by Indifference 74 deaths and counting” drew attention to these continued failings in the NHS. The General Medical Council has been working to expand and explain its guidance [read the full story…]
Rett syndrome is a neurological disorder mainly affecting females which although present from birth, may remain undetected until around one year of age. Many people with Rett syndrome have a mutation on the MECP2 gene on the X chromosome. The authors of this study were interested in describing the Rett syndrome behavioural phenotype by using [read the full story…]
Self-esteem is a concept well used in psychology to describe how a person evaluates their own worth and can be viewed positively and negatively. In this quantitative study, the researcher was interested in how prevalent low self-esteem was in a population of people with learning disabilities in a forensic service. She used an adapted version [read the full story…]
Getting information from people with learning disabilities about their health is often done through discussions with professionals and carers. The authors of this study wanted to know more about the health problems people with learning disabilities themselves reported and whether there were differences from what their carers’ reported. They explored this by carrying out a [read the full story…]
Frequent readers won’t be surprised to read we are always keen to support improvements in the quality of research. One of the clarion calls of many systematic reviews is for better quality studies to increase the numbers of trials that meet inclusion criteria. It was with great interest therefore that we read of the commissioning [read the full story…]
A key indicator of service outcomes for people with learning disabilities is quality of life. However, there continues to be debate in the literature about the best way to define this and the best way to measure it. Most of the major service providers in the UK for example have some form of routine outcome [read the full story…]
A recent review of literature suggested that interactions between support workers and people with learning disabilities with congenital deafblindess were lacking both in quantity and in quality. The authors of the current small study wanted to look in more detail at the perspectives of the support staff on their interactions with this group of people. [read the full story…]
The authors of this review set out to take a comprehensive look at the literature relating to the outcomes for Children of parents with learning disability to test assumptions that such children are at risk of poor outcomes. The authors identified 26 studies from a database and reference search published in one year from March [read the full story…]
Adults with learning disabilities who become parents face a range of challenges in addition to those faced by their non-disabled peers. As adults with disabilities, they are more likely to be socially isolated and at risk of poor psychological well-being and the added pressure of parenthood can magnify these risks. The authors of the current [read the full story…]
We recently posted about the views of older people with learning disabilities and the things they wanted in relation to their support. In recent years there have also been a number of projects that have focused on ways to provide support to older carers of people. Those projects have suggested the key mediator role of [read the full story…]
