The Department of Health has this week published its interim report into the events at Winterbourne View, the private hospital in Bristol in which the BBC’s Panorama programme uncovered shocking abuse by care staff. The reports finds that: Too many people are placed in in-patient services for assessment and treatment (A&T) and are staying there [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 PAS-ADD (Psychiatric Assessment Schedule for Adults with a Developmental Disability) checklist is a 25 item questionnaire which uses non technical language and was designed to be used by support staff and families. The thinking was that it was these groups of people who spent the most time with the disabled person and so would [read the full story…]
Last year, the BBC screened its secret filming at the Winterbourne view home in Bristol which showed shocking scenes of abuse. The subsequent inquiry led to arrests and convictions, but there were concerns that this was not an isolated incident. The care services minister stated his determination to strengthen safeguards and the Care Standards Commission [read the full story…]
Physical interventions are still widely used in learning disability services, with BILD estimating their use in around half of all people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour. The experience of people with learning disabilities of such interventions is not something that has been reported widely in the literature, but the researchers in this study set [read the full story…]
We have posted previously about the use of physical interventions in services supporting people with learning disabilities, drawing attention to the high levels of use in people described as having challenging behaviour. The researchers in this study in the Netherlands set out to look at the antecedent factors of restraint in people with learning disabilities [read the full story…]
Positive behavioural support (PBS) recognises the importance of understanding the basis of why someone is exhibiting a behaviour that is challenging, and that there is a need to consider both proactive and reactive strategies in developing interventions. There has been a good deal reported in the literature about the training needs of paid carers in this [read the full story…]
Behaviour support plans to guide the way supporters respond and react to people with learning disabilities who are described as having behaviour that challenges are fundamental to the quality of support they receive. The authors of this Australian study were interested in looking at the quality of the plans and their effectiveness in providing support. [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…]
The term ‘physical interventions’ refers to ‘any method of responding to challenging behaviour which involves some degree of direct physical force to limit or restrict movement or mobility’ The authors of this literature review set out to look at the current evidence on the use of restraint as an intervention in managing challenging behaviours in [read the full story…]
