Transitions and people with intellectual disabilities.

Aim: The Commission for Social Care Inspection (2007) drew attention to the ‘nightmare’ of moving from children’s to adults’ services for both young people with complex needs and their families. This project aims to map the experiences of young people during transition in relation to the kinds of support they wanted, what they received, the problems they encountered and their future aspirations. We also explore how their carers perceive transitional support provided.

Method: We have developed a semi-structured instrument based on the Life History Calendar (Caspi and Moffitt 1996) to collect retrospective event-history data of both the positive and negative experiences of individuals (n=20) and their carers (n=40) as they have gone through the transition process as well as a quantitative satisfaction scale to allow young people and their carers to rate their experiences of transition.

Results: Our pilot has so far indicated that individuals and their carers are provided with little information about what is on offer to them during the transitional process. Rather, it is those who ‘ask or shout the loudest’ who are able to benefit from transitional provision.

Conclusions: We will discuss conclusions of the main study and recommendations during the presentation.