Amani Osman Hassan
CWM Taf University Health Board, UK
Title: The STOMP in children and adolescents with learning disabilities in South Wales, UK
Biography
Biography: Amani Osman Hassan
Abstract
Background: Stopping over medication of people with a learning disability, autism or both (STOMP) is a project in the UK.
It looks at people being given psychotropic medicine because their behaviour is seen as challenging. People with a learning disability, autism or both are more likely to be given these medicines than other people without. These medicines can be good for some people with mental illness or challenging behaviour, but have side effects such as weight gain and tiredness so the less people need this medicine, the better.
Aim: Our service is a tertiary service specialising in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) Learning Disability (LD) in South Wales. It started in 2012 and covers 3 Health Boards.
This project assessed how suitable the STOMP guidelines are for our patients. We also thought about how the STOMP guideline might need to change for children and Adolescents
Methods: We looked at hospital notes of all our patients. Their age, gender, diagnosis and what medicine they were taking was written down. When patients were taking psychotropic medicine, and if we were following all of the STOMP guidelines was also recorded. If we were not doing what STOMP suggested, notes were explored to find a reason.
Results: Positive findings were clear reasons for prescribing were found in (98.39%), psycho educating patients and their families with regard to risk and benefits (95.08%) and follow ups (96.77%).
Most patient care plans considered if medication was still required (66.13%).
Negative findings were low percentage with regard to assessing capacity and gaining formal consent (11.29%). Also the service was rated low at explaining that a medicine is ‘off-label’ (4.55%).
Conclusions: CAMHS focuses their work on the whole family. Consent is gained from discussion with the family as a whole. This needs to be formalised, as STOMP recommends. Capacity assessments are only relevant for over 16 year olds.
Moving forward CAMHS LD specific STOMP guidelines should be developed.