Alison Turner explores a recent study of patient and public involvement in clinical commissioning, which found that PPI representatives are often uncertain about their role and how their contribution is used.
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Alastair Canaway and Chris Sampson look at a new PSSRU report on youth mental health services in the UK, and how they affect health, education and employment.
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Transforming Care, the government’s response to WInterbourne view, set some clear targets for the development of community services and the reduction on specialist inpatient bed numbers.
Here Alix Dixon looks at a paper, which used some illustrative case examples to explore some of the policy and practice issues around these targets.
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Mike Clark considers some of the challenges of organisational co-production revealed by a study on social prescribing for people living with dementia.
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Down syndrome is the most common cause of learning disability in the UK and increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia is well documented.
In her debut blog, Silvana Mengoni looks at a paper which uses three case studies to consider some interesting trajectories of dementia which raise some interesting questions.
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Non-epileptic seizures can have a major impact on the quality of life of people affected. Those with an organic, physical cause may be relatively easy to diagnose, and if the underlying cause can be found, it may of course be amenable to treatment and if that treatment is successful, the seizures may stop. Some seizures [read the full story…]
The aim of this paper, written for commissioners, managers, and health decision-makers, was to look at how commissioning works for people with long-term conditions such as dementia. The authors carried out a multisite mixed methods case study research, involving three ‘commissioning communities’ and using interviews, documents, and meeting observations to reach their conclusions. A commissioning [read the full story…]
Fear and anxiety about medical procedures can be a barrier to accessing healthcare for people with learning disabilities. In particular, fear of needles can mean that blood tests may not be able to be taken and this can prove a significant clinical challenge. The researchers in this case study used a changing criterion design, they [read the full story…]
We have posted previously about the challenges faced by people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities in communication and the ways in which those who support them might use a variety of tools to improve this. Researchers have asked whether it might be possible to look at changes in physiology to provide information on emotions [read the full story…]
Supporting people with profound learning disabilities creates a communication challenge for those in the supporting role raising the question of how best to understand and respond when people do not use words to communicate. We have posted previously about resources available to help with this issue, for example national projects like Mencap’s Involve Me as [read the full story…]
