The University of Canberra has been awarded $1.87 million to develop a national training program for disability support workers in the use of psychotropic medications for people with intellectual and developmental disability in Australia.
Psychotropic medicines, a class of medication that alters behaviour, mood, thoughts and perception and their use in the treatment of people with intellectual and developmental disability has long been flagged as an area for improvement, with notable recommendations from the 2023 Disability Royal Commission calling for the development of a national training program addressing their use.
The primary focus of the new program is training disability support workers, to enable them to better support people with intellectual and developmental disability who use medicines.
Topics covered in the training will include:
- Consent
- Rights
- Shared decision making
- Medications: profile, safe administration, monitoring, side effects
- Effective communication strategies between healthcare teams.
“The training will be tailored to Australian workforce structures and regulatory environments to ensure relevance and practical application,” Associate Professor Mary Bushell, project co-lead, discipline lead in pharmacy at the University of Canberra, told F2L.
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce medication related errors, enhance safety, and improve health outcomes and quality of life for people with disability.”
The role of pharmacists in psychotropic training
Pharmacists are engaged as expert advisors in the development of the training program and materials.
“As medicines experts, they will ensure that the training educates disability support workers in key concepts around medicines use, safe administration, and monitoring, to better support the people they care for,” Bushell said. “As a disability support worker for seven years before I became a pharmacist, I remember wanting to understand more about the medicines I was administering to my clients. This training program aims to bridge that gap.”
Disability service providers Minda and Aruma are engaged as partners for the program codesign and delivery.
The codesign development process will commence soon and take around 18 months. Training combines online modules with interactive face-to-face workshops, that supports flexibility for support workers and allows for hands-on, scenario-based learning.
In the original UK SPECTROM project, aimed at support workers and carers, pharmacists, psychiatrists and other health workers played a role ensuring the training program was evidence based.
“While around one in three people with intellectual disability are prescribed psychotropic medication, many disability support workers feel inadequately prepared to administer them,” said Macey Barratt, University of Canberra researcher and educator who will lead the development of the new training program.
She added previous research had highlighted the interest amongst frontline staff in improving their skills and understanding of how to use psychotropic medications – while also highlighting that existing education in the space was inaccessible or produced in other countries without comparable health systems.
This meant there has been a lack of informed understanding about the effects of these medications, awareness of alternative interventions, and confidence amongst support workers in advocating for the right treatments.
“We are pleased to be undertaking this journey through a co-design process that brings together the disability community: people with lived experience of disability, industry partners, leaders in disability research, and a multidisciplinary team of health professionals spanning speech pathology, psychology, psychiatry, nursing, pharmacy, mental health research and educational design,” Barratt said.
“Quality treatment transforms quality of life, the scale of support for this project represents a powerful shared priority on an important issue.”