Background: Rehabilitation has emerged as a comprehensive approach with a
combination of treatment modalities to address the multiple impediments associated
with disabilities in intellectually disabled people. Rehabilitation is used to address
intellectually disabled peoples’ skill deficits, to improve competencies and to facilitate
optimal functioning within the goal of giving the greatest possible measure of social and
economic participation, independence, self–reliance and self–determination to
intellectually disabled people. The ongoing improvement of rehabilitation services in the
public health system therefore remains a continuous challenge; hence the need for
further research.
Objective: The systematic literature review critically synthesizes and describes the
available evidence of the effects of rehabilitation on intellectually disabled people.
Method: Literature searches of different electronic databases as well as manual
searches of references of primary studies were conducted using selected keywords.
The total number of the studies identified from an electronic database search was
1 102. All titles and abstracts were screened for relevance and 40 studies were
immediately excluded. From the remaining 1 062 studies, another 993 studies were
excluded because they were not relevant to the rehabilitation of intellectually disabled
people. The abstracts and titles of the remaining 69 studies were screened for a second
time to exclude studies not relevant to actual rehabilitation of intellectually disabled
people. Another two studies were excluded as duplicates. The remaining 67 studies
were retrieved as full texts; of these, 40 studies were excluded due to them being
written in a foreign language. After all abstracts and texts were thoroughly screened for
true relevancy to the review question, a further 20 studies were excluded. The remaining seven full–text studies were selected for critical appraisal because they were
relevant to the effects of rehabilitation on intellectually disabled people.
Results: These identified studies have the potential to inform clinical practice on the
basis of their evidenced interventions that resulted in the improvement of outcomes of
rehabilitation of intellectually disabled people. Improvement of skills was noted for mildly
and moderately intellectually disabled people. Improvement was noted in activities of
daily living (ADL), self–care skills, communication skills and cognitive achievements.
Conclusions: The study contributes to the comprehensive nursing care of intellectually
disabled people by endorsement of the effectiveness of rehabilitation in terms of ADL,
self–care skills, communication skills and cognitive achievements. The collected
evidence of this study may contribute to the education of more effective nurse
practitioners involved in the daily care and rehabilitation of intellectually disabled people. / Thesis (M.Cur.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nwu/oai:dspace.nwu.ac.za:10394/7563 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Sechoaro, Ernest Joshua |
| Publisher | North-West University |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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