Inclusive mainstream services for people with intellectual disabilities: A relational approach.

Background: Despite growing recognition of their right for inclusion in society, people with intellectual disabilities are often excluded from mainstream services, or experience poor service outcomes.

Method: Taking a relational approach that considers the interpersonal relations and interactions that occur in mainstream service settings in Australia, this paper examines the features of services that research participants considered more inclusive.

Results: Relations between service users with and without intellectual disabilities, mainstream service staff and disability support workers in inclusive mainstream services were characterised by; respect; warm, welcoming and convivial interpersonal engagement; active listening; proactive assistance; flexibility; mediation to create a safe environment; and collaboration and shared responsibility by both mainstream staff and disability support workers in supporting a service user with intellectual disability.

Vulnerability and recovery: Long-term mental and physical health trajectories following climate-related disasters.

Extreme weather and climate-related disaster events are associated with a range of adverse health outcomes. People are not equally vulnerable to the adversity, experiencing varied patterns of long-term health trajectories in recovery depending on their vulnerabilities, capacities, and resiliencies. This study aims to identify latent mental and physical health trajectories and their associations with person- and place-based pre-disaster predictors.

More-than-care: People with intellectual disability and emerging vulnerability during pandemic lockdown.

This paper offers more-than-care as a framework for analysing how vulnerability emerges in the lives of people with intellectual disability beyond relations of care. More-than-care detaches vulnerability from the identity category of disability. It provides a framework for conceptualising vulnerability in an unequal, neoliberalising, and ableist world and sheds new light on the ever-evolving constitution of vulnerability and disability.

Parental strategies that support adults with intellectual disabilities to explore decision preferences, constraints and consequences.

Background: Supporting participation in decision making is complex, dynamic and multifactorial. The aim of this study was to understand more about the difficulties parents of adults with intellectual disabilities experienced in providing decision support and their strategies for resolving them.

Method: Participants were 23 parents who regularly provided decision support for their adult with intellectual disabilities.

"I used to call him a non-decision-maker - I never do that anymore": parental reflections about training to support decision-making of their adult offspring with intellectual disabilities.

Purpose: A rights perspective proposes supported decision-making as an alternative to substitute decision-making. However, evidence about supported decision-making practice is limited. Our aim was to build evidence about building the capacity of decision supporters.

Possibility and risk in encounter between people with and without intellectual disability.

Background: Unpredictability, the risk of harm and possibility of rewards, are integral elements of encounter. Risk literature offers insight on the complex ways in which risk perceptions and attunements shape behaviours and interactions in encounter between people with and without intellectual disability.

Method: The paper draws on risk literature, encounter literature, and examples from the authors' previously published studies on encounter and work integrated social enterprises.

Mediating Community Participation: Practice of Support Workers in Initiating, Facilitating or Disrupting Encounters between People with and without Intellectual Disability.

Promoting community participation for people with intellectual disability through encounter with strangers is an integral part of the mission of disability support workers. This paper offers detailed micro-level analysis of the practices of support workers when they accompany a person with intellectual disability outside their home and explores the subtle differences which make some staff practices more effective than others in promoting more convivial encounters with strangers. Based on 160 h of observations of twenty-six adults with intellectual disability in a variety of public places, and interviews and focus groups with their support workers, the paper points to some of the critical judgements support workers need to make when considering whether, when and how to initiate or intervene in such encounters.