Staff in forensic services
for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are expected to deal with a wide
range of emotional challenges when providing care. The potential impact of this
demanding work has not been systematically explored previously. This article
explores the professional quality of life (QoL) and the resilience (hardiness)
of the staff in this setting. The Professional QoL questionnaire and the
Disposional Resilience Scale were completed by staff (n=85, 80% response rate)
in the Norwegian forensic service for ID offenders. Responses from staff
working in institutional settings were compared to those from staff in local
community services. Staff in the local community services had higher resilience
scores compared to the staff in the institutional setting, (t=2.19; P<0.05).
However in the other QoL and resilience domains there were no differences
between the staff in the two settings. The greater sense of resilient control
among community staff may be a function of both the number of service users
they work with and the institutional demands they face. Even though these
participants worked with relatively high risk clients, they did not report
significantly impaired quality of life compared to other occupations.
...People with intellectual disabilities (ID) who are also
offenders are some of the most difficult health service users to treat and
historically they have also received little attention from researchers or the
wider society.5The research that has been conducted
has concentrated on offenders with mild ID within secure placements. Offenders
with a moderate or more severe level of ID seldom enter the criminal justice
system (CJS), as they are diverted into mental health services, ID services, or
forensic mental health services. As a result, there is a dearth of studies
exploring the needs and living conditions of offenders with moderate ID
compared with offenders with mild ID.
Offenders with ID have many characteristics in
common with offenders in the general population.6,7 They
tend to be young and male and have experienced social disadvantage, unstable
environments, and financial instability.8 There
is little research on how the characteristics of people with ID who are labeled offendersmay differ from those with ID who do
not offend.9 Holland et al.7 proposed
that two groups of offenders with ID can be distinguished according to whether
they are known to the ID services. Amongst the smaller group who are known to
services the term offence may often be confused with challenging behavior.10
The Norwegian system has quite restrictive policies
regarding diversion of offenders with ID from the criminal justice system.
There has been some focus on intellectual impairment among offenders,11 but
the government’s priorities are focused elsewhere on, for instance, building
more prison accommodation, encouraging multidisciplinary cooperation in
preventing recidivism, developing alternatives to imprisonment alongside better
rehabilitation services and evidence-based research...12
Full article at: http://goo.gl/EnYyTD
By: Erik Søndenaa,1,2 Christian Lauvrud,1 Marita Sandvik,3 Kåre Nonstad,1 and Richard Whittington1,4
1St. Olavs University Hospital, Forensic
Department, Brøset, Trondheim, Norway, UK
2University College of Sør-Trøndelag, Department
of Social Education, Trondheim, Norway, UK
3St. Olavs University Hospital, Forensic
Unit for Offenders with Intellectual Disabilities, Brøset, Trondheim, Norway,
UK
4University of Liverpool, Institute of
Psychology, Health and Society, Health & Community Care Research Unit,
Liverpool, UK
St. Olavs University Hospital, Forensic dep. Brøset, Postbox
1803, Lade, 7440 Trondheim, Norway. Phone: +47.992.44771.
More at: https://twitter.com/hiv insight
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