Tag Archives: education

Care Aims in education vs. medical model

Clare Grace raised a great question in response to my post from 2009, Clinical Risk vs. Clinical Need: managing workload and throughput:

My biggest conundrum at the minute, is that the risk assessment tools are very medical model – and don’t seem to reflect anything within the tools/structures of education – and 80% of our caseload is working into an educational setting – any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Although I’m no longer working in the same service, I can remember discussions about how the approach fitted with our work in education.

I’m looking at Malcomess’ “risk” and “clinical risk” grids. The risk assessment requires judgements about functional impact on Activities for Daily Living (ADL) and environmental adaptation. We can consider ADL in the classroom. In terms of environmental adaptation I’ve found a note I wrote on one of the handouts saying: “score environment which is least adaptive (and central.)” So a child in an educational environment which is significantly contributing to risk would score highly on the context column.

In terms of clinical risk we discussed thinking about school staff as well as carers in the first column: motivation for change / carer responsibility. We need to consider who in the child’s life is primary, in relation to impact. A teacher who is unable or unwilling to collaborate in the treatment process would cause a child to score lower in this column (if the SLT service was entirely school based.)

What do you think about using the tools in education settings?