The effectiveness of dementia care mapping in intellectual disability residential services: a follow-up study.

This article is presented as a follow-up to exploratory work published in this journal in 2001. It describes a study that aimed to assess the effectiveness of dementia care mapping in supporting practice improvement in intellectual disability residential services. An average of 9 hours of observational data was collected using dementia care mapping in relation to 14 adults with severe or profound intellectual disabilities. Sixteen interviews were also undertaken with staff over a 4 month period.The findings provided a detailed picture of the activities and interactions between the participants involved in the study and raised some issues about 'organizational culture' when developing person-centred approaches. They have helped strengthen the case that care mapping has the potential to be a useful addition to the existing repertoire of tools to support effective practice improvement and person-centred planning.