Inter-Professional Collaborative Care: A Way to Enhance Services for Adults with Intellectual Disability and/or Autism Spectrum Disorder and Mental Health Problems

This article describes our inter-professional mental health service for adults with intellectual disability and/or autism spectrum disorder. The service consists of an inpatient unit and outpatient program that are closely aligned and operate within a mental health and addictions teaching hospital. We provide information about recent changes to our model of care and the structures and activities that are used to support inter-professional team development and team functioning. Roles and functions of different mental health professionals on the team are outlined and case examples of adults with intellectual disability and complex mental health needs are provided to illustrate how the inter-professional team members work together

The importance of instant impact: What matters to long‐term care staff and residents about taking part in research?

There is an urgent need for research that can inform policy and practice in long-term care.1 However, issues such as high levels of staff turnover,2 misconceptions and negative attitudes about research,3, 4 and chronic staff shortages5 are obstacles to engaging long-term care staff and residents with research. The COVID-19 pandemic also exposed gaps in the research infrastructure within long-term care,1 highlighting the need for innovative approaches that could foster a collaborative research culture within the long-term care sector.Understanding what long-term care staff and residents think and feel about research is an important first step toward collaborative research engagement. We therefore drew on field notes that we took during our conversations between researchers, and 11 members of staff and seven residents from two long-term care homes in Toronto (Canada) and one in Manchester (UK), in May and July 2023, about their views and experiences of taking part in research. The staff roles represented included management/directorship, care assistance, nursing, programming/activity coordination, research leadership, and administration. In this article, we share some of the key insights gained from these conversations about how researchers could more effectively engage staff and residents in research