Emergency Ambulance Healthcare for People With Intellectual Disabilities: A Scoping Review.
Billy Ridler, Julia Sterman, Jennifer Murray and 2 others
A scoping review found no study capturing the actual experience of people with intellectual disabilities calling an ambulance.
The sources it did find were mostly about paramedic students' attitudes. This identifies a gap in evidence, not a treatment effect.
Key findings
1The review could not answer its primary question because none of the included sources represented the perspective of people with intellectual disabilities in the emergency ambulance context.
2No included study had people with intellectual disabilities as its participant population; the empirical sources sampled paramedic students and emergency medical service providers.
3Thematic analysis of the included sources identified four core themes: empathy, education, interprofessional working, and capacity and decision-making.
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What it does not show
No included study had people with intellectual disabilities as participants, so the review could not speak to the actual patient experience in ambulance care. Four of the six empathy studies shared the same primary author, which the authors note may inflate the prominence of that theme. All screening, data extraction, and thematic analysis were done by a single author (the doctoral student), rather than by two independent reviewers. Forward citation searching was done on a sample of sources rather than all of them. Non-English-language sources were excluded. The grey literature search was limited to the UK. The sixth (consultation) phase of the Arksey and O'Malley framework had not yet been completed at the time of writing. The included sources treated people with intellectual disabilities as a homogeneous group, with limited acknowledgement of individual variation.
Declared interests
The corresponding author is the recipient of a funded doctoral programme through Edinburgh Napier University. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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