Community Residential Services and People with Learning Disabilities - Literature review Example

Implications for individuals interested in the helping and care profession as well as for policy-making bodies are articulated. The study provides future direction for researches that will provide empirical data on the relationship between community care residential resources and QOL. The 1990s saw a significant transition in the services available for individuals with learning disabilities – from residential hospitals to community residential services. Since the 1960s, “deinstitutionalization has dominated the development of social policy with learning disabilities in most of the world’s richer countries” (Emerson and Hatton 23).

Four major factors paved the way for this revolutionary change in the care and services offered to people with learning disabilities. Aside from the period of economic growth, the 1960’s witnessed the strengthening of human rights advocacy groups as a response of the atrocities of World War II. Marginalized groups, including people with learning disabilities, gained significant attention from international organizations. Another factor related to human rights movement was the discovery of substandard living conditions of institutionalized individuals in the UK and North America.

Reports about the “degrading conditions in which people with learning disabilities were being ‘cared for’ or ‘supported’ by the state” (Emerson and Hatton 24) became sensational in these countries. The third important factor that led to deinstitutionalization is the growing research interest in the possibilities of educating individuals with learning disabilities, a work pioneered by Jack Trizard in 1952.