Quality of Life Outcomes in a Community Cohort of Adults With an Intellectual Disability Using the Personal Outcome Scale.
Tom Burke, Andrew Deffew, Owen Stafford and 10 others
PMID 36188891WHAT IT FOUND
The Personal Outcome Scale can be used as a total score and three broad scores, independence, social participation and well-being, in this sample, not as separate well-being domains.
Adults attending local day services had the lowest quality-of-life scores.
Key findings
01The self-report total score and the independence and social participation subscales reached the paper's good threshold, while the emotional, physical and material components of well-being did not reach its acceptable threshold.
02Participants using local day services had the lowest total self-report and observer-report scores, and these were significantly lower than scores for participants using outreach or residential services.
03Participants with mild intellectual disability had significantly higher self-reported total scores than participants with severe/profound disability, and participants with moderate disability also had significantly higher self-reported total scores than participants with severe/profound disability.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show whether quality of life changes over time or after an intervention. It used a convenience sample from one community-based service in Ireland, so it may not represent other services or countries. Only 10 people were in the severe/profound intellectual disability group, so findings involving that group are limited. The paper states that there is limited information on what represents a good score or meaningful change. Several individual well-being domains had low reliability scores, so they should not be used as separate outcome measures. Disability level was based on historical categories and was not assessed or confirmed as part of the study. The scale was administered without modification for severity of disability, so functional limitations may affect scores.
Declared interests
Partly funded by the Irish Research Council under New Foundations 2020. The authors declared no commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the emotional, physical or material well-being scores as separate outcomes, or assume that local day services caused lower quality of life. The study found associations in one cross-sectional sample, and those separate well-being scores did not meet the paper's acceptable threshold.