Intensive Support Teams study v.1.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Clinical and cost evaluation of intensive support teams (IST) for adults with intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviour.
IRAS ID
239820
Contact name
Angela Hassiotis
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 2 months, 31 days
Research summary
About 17% of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) living in the community have challenging behaviour such as aggression to others or property, self-injury or hyperactivity. There are concerns that adults with ID and challenging behaviour over-use medication, spend large periods of time in hospital, and miss out on living in the community. Hospital care is expensive, and costs are increasing. NHS England has produced draft guidance about Intensive Support Teams (ISTs) proposing that they should be part of all community ID services in England. However, there is currently very little evidence about how effective ISTs are. The people who pay for Health and Social Care services (commissioners) would like more information, and this project aims to provide this.
The project we propose runs over 36 months and consists of two parts. In the first part we endeavoured to find out how many, and what type of ISTs exist in England, by asking service managers about their service, their staff, and the work they do. The aim of the first part was to identify different models of IST so that we can compare how different models work with people with ID and other local service.
We will collect data twice over 9 months to see which model(s) work best. We will also carry out interviews with people who use ISTs, family and paid carers, and referrers to ISTs to find out about their experiences of these services, and how happy they are with them. Analysing and putting this data together will tell us about how effective each of the models are at reducing challenging behaviours, how much they cost, and which one service users, their families and people who work in other connected services prefer most.REC name
London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/LO/0890
Date of REC Opinion
22 Jun 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion