Adults with intellectual and/or other developmental disabilities face a cascade of health challenges. They often:
- have complex or difficult-to-treat medical conditions,
- have difficulty accessing health care, either physically or financially,
- may receive inadequate or inappropriate health care,
- may have difficulties expressing their symptoms and pain, or
- receive little attention to wellness, preventive care, and health promotion.
Yet these adults deserve quality, patient-centered health care as well as the general population.
The IDD Toolkit promote preventive care actions that might easily be overlooked in adults with IDD, such as screening, immunizations, and medication reviews. Types of tools included are:
- point-of-care forms providing guidance for health care decision-making, health checks, and mental health assessments;
- monitoring charts for health maintenance and prevention of comorbidities (see References); and
- patient and family/support person tools that facilitate health care interactions.
The IDD Toolkit is a project of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, in partnership with Surrey Place in Toronto, Ontario. The VKC received funding from the WITH Foundation, which focuses its efforts on improving health care for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Our hope is that this website will give virtually every U.S. primary care provider electronic access to best practice tools and thus will enable each clinician to more readily serve adults with intellectual and/or other developmental disabilities.