Background: During COVID-19 measures face-to-face contact is limited and professional carers have to find other ways to support people with intellectual disabilities. COVID-19 measures can increase stress in people with intellectual disabilities, although some people may adapt to or grow from these uncertain situations. Resilience is the process of effectively negotiating, adapting to, or managing significant sources of stress and trauma. The current study aims to provide professional carers with new insights into how they can support people with intellectual disabilities. Method: An online survey was shared through the social media and organizational newsletters of MEE ZHN (a non-governmental organization for people with disabilities). The resilience framework by Ungar (2019) was adapted to fit to people with intellectual disabilities during COVID-19 measures. Statistical analyses were performed in SPSS statistics version 26. Results: Results show that professional carers applied diverse and distal methods to maintain contact with people with intellectual disabilities during the COVID-19 measures. Professional carers reported a significant decrease in the quality of contact with clients with intellectual disabilities, but overall high levels of resilience in the same clients. Implications: Online methods of communication are possibly insufficient for professionals to cover all needs of people with intellectual disabilities. During this pandemic professionals should be aware of stress but also of resilience in people with intellectual disabilities.
Abstract Background: Although there is little evidence on their efficacy regarding challenging behaviour, antipsychotics are the most used psychotropic drugs in residential intellectually disabled people. Discontinuation is possible for some residential clients with intellectual disabilities. This study aimed to gain insight into support staff's perceptions of discontinuing antipsychotics in residential clients with intellectual disabilities. Method: Four focus groups were conducted in this mixed‐methods study, followed by a survey. Results: A large majority of support staff perceive antipsychotics to be effective in controlling challenging behaviour. Support staff regarded themselves as willing to contribute to the discontinuation of antipsychotics, but were more confident about achieving reductions. Conclusions: The attitude of the majority of support staff towards discontinuation provides a good basis for regularly reviewing antipsychotics use. A reduction plan should include preliminary steps, methods of monitoring and evaluating the process, and establishing measures for dealing with possible crises.
The ageing of people with intellectual disabilities, with associated morbidity like dementia, calls for new types of care. Person-centered methods may support care staff in providing this, an example being Dementia Care Mapping (DCM). DCM has been shown to be feasible in ID-care. We examined the experiences of ID-professionals in using DCM. We performed a mixed-methods study, using quantitative data from care staff (N = 136) and qualitative data (focus-groups, individual interviews) from care staff, group home managers and DCM-in-intellectual disabilities mappers (N = 53). ageing, dementia, Dementia Care Mapping, intellectual disability, mixed-methods, personcentred care
MULTIFILE
Everyone has the right to participate in society to the best of their ability. This right also applies to people with a visual impairment, in combination with a severe or profound intellectual and possibly motor disability (VISPIMD). However, due to their limitations, for their participation these people are often highly dependent on those around them, such as family members andhealthcare professionals. They determine how people with VISPIMD participate and to what extent. To optimize this support, they must have a good understanding of what people with disabilities can still do with their remaining vision.It is currently difficult to gain insight into the visual abilities of people with disabilities, especially those with VISPIMD. As a professional said, "Everything we can think of or develop to assess the functional vision of this vulnerable group will help improve our understanding and thus our ability to support them. Now, we are more or less guessing about what they can see.Moreover, what little we know about their vision is hard to communicate to other professionals”. Therefore, there is a need for methods that can provide insight into the functional vision of people with VISPIMD, in order to predict their options in daily life situations. This is crucial knowledge to ensure that these people can participate in society to their fullest extent.What makes it so difficult to get this insight at the moment? Visual impairments can be caused by a range of eye or brain disorders and can manifest in various ways. While we understand fairly well how low vision affects a person's abilities on relatively simple visual tasks, it is much more difficult to predict this in more complex dynamic everyday situations such asfinding your way or moving around during daily activities. This is because, among other things, conventional ophthalmic tests provide little information about what people can do with their remaining vision in everyday life (i.e., their functional vision).An additional problem in assessing vision in people with intellectual disabilities is that many conventional tests are difficult to perform or are too fatiguing, resulting in either no or the wrong information. In addition to their visual impairment, there is also a very serious intellectual disability (possibly combined with a motor impairment), which makes it even more complex to assesstheir functional vision. Due to the interplay between their visual, intellectual, and motor disabilities, it is almost impossible to determine whether persons are unable to perform an activity because they do not see it, do not notice it, do not understand it, cannot communicate about it, or are not able to move their head towards the stimulus due to motor disabilities.Although an expert professional can make a reasonable estimate of the functional possibilities through long-term and careful observation, the time and correct measurement data are usually lacking to find out the required information. So far, it is insufficiently clear what people with VZEVMB provoke to see and what they see exactly.Our goal with this project is to improve the understanding of the visual capabilities of people with VISPIMD. This then makes it possible to also improve the support for participation of the target group. We want to achieve this goal by developing and, in pilot form, testing a new combination of measurement and analysis methods - primarily based on eye movement registration -to determine the functional vision of people with VISPIMD. Our goal is to systematically determine what someone is responding to (“what”), where it may be (“where”), and how much time that response will take (“when”). When developing methods, we take the possibilities and preferences of the person in question as a starting point in relation to the technological possibilities.Because existing technological methods were originally developed for a different purpose, this partly requires adaptation to the possibilities of the target group.The concrete end product of our pilot will be a manual with an overview of available technological methods (as well as the methods themselves) for assessing functional vision, linked to the specific characteristics of the target group in the cognitive, motor area: 'Given that a client has this (estimated) combination of limitations (cognitive, motor and attention, time in whichsomeone can concentrate), the order of assessments is as follows:' followed by a description of the methods. We will also report on our findings in a workshop for professionals, a Dutch-language article and at least two scientific articles. This project is executed in the line: “I am seen; with all my strengths and limitations”. During the project, we closely collaborate with relevant stakeholders, i.e. the professionals with specific expertise working with the target group, family members of the persons with VISPIMD, and persons experiencing a visual impairment (‘experience experts’).
The central aim of this project is to increase the participation of people (all ages) with severe multiple disabilities (PIMD) in the field of sport, exercise and physical activity, by expanding the number of coaches and organizations who offer a Motor Activity Training Program in a professional and custom way. This aim will be achieved by the following activities:- Creating a more appropriate and varied offer of sport, exercise, and physical activity to increase the choice of the PIMD target group. - To develop a curriculum for MATP Coaches and Trainers (PE Teachers, Physical Therapists, etc). - To implement, test and contextualize a PIMD offer in 3 EU countries, this will be done with local stakeholders. - Strengthening the connection between sport, education and health care organizations to enable participation of the PIMD people in the field of sport, exercise, and physical activity. - Consortium members create a European network and exchange knowledge, including through best practices
Op een waardige manier deelnemen aan en deel zijn van het maatschappelijk leven is niet altijd even makkelijk als je een beperking hebt. Het onderzoek van Jeroen Knevel is erop gericht bij te dragen aan de levenskwaliteit van mensen die belemmeringen ervaren. Zijn onderzoek doet hij samen met de praktijk en laat hij in allerlei creatieve en speelse vormen terugkomen in het onderwijs.
