Limited concordance between teachers, parents and healthcare professionals on the presence of chronic diseases in ID-adolescents.
Teachers under-identify mental and physical chronic diseases in teens with ID, so always cross-check health reports before treating behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked teachers, parents, and family doctors about the same group of teens with intellectual disability.
Each adult filled out a checklist of chronic diseases for the teen. The study then looked at how often the three adults agreed.
What they found
Agreement was low. Teachers noticed far fewer mental health conditions than parents and doctors did.
Because teachers see the teens every day, their low counts suggest many needs are missed at school.
How this fits with other research
Bailey et al. (2010) used the same teens and showed that those with chronic diseases—especially mental ones—have four to eight times more emotional and behavior problems. The low teacher counts in the target paper now explain part of why those problems stay high: the diseases driving them are invisible at school.
Bailey et al. (2010) also found that teens with chronic somatic illnesses show more mild autism-like behaviors. Again, if teachers under-count both mental and somatic diseases, they may blame behavior on "the ID" instead of treatable medical issues.
Welsh et al. (2019) showed mainstream teachers feel unsure about autism behaviors. Together these studies build a chain: teachers miss medical diagnoses, misread the behavior that follows, and feel unready to help.
Why it matters
Before you write a behavior plan, gather health data from parents and doctors, not just the school nurse. A simple email to the family asking for current diagnoses can reveal asthma, epilepsy, or anxiety that never reached the IEP. Sharing that list with teachers lets them link medical symptoms to classroom behavior and adjust triggers, breaks, or reinforcement instead of assuming "non-compliance.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Evidence on teachers' knowledge about somatic and mental chronic diseases among ID-adolescent compared to the knowledge parents and healthcare professionals have, is limited. The aim of this study is: (1) to assess the knowledge of teachers on the presence of chronic diseases in ID-adolescents; (2) to compare teachers with parents and healthcare professionals and parents with healthcare professionals regarding the knowledge on the presence of chronic diseases in ID-adolescents. We obtained data on 1044 ID-adolescents attending secondary schools, fully covering one region of the Netherlands. Teachers, parents and general practitioners (GPs) of the adolescents completed a questionnaire about the occurrence of chronic diseases in their child during the previous 12 months. The questionnaire was derived from the Dutch National Permanent Survey on Living Conditions questionnaire periodically administered in a representative population sample (n ≈ 10,000). Concordance between teachers, parents and healthcare professionals on the presence of chronic diseases in ID-adolescents was relatively low. In about half of all 66 dyads the concordance was for the most part fair and just in 10 dyads good to very good; nine of these latter cases concerned somatic chronic diseases. In addition, teachers reported mostly lower prevalence rates of chronic diseases in ID-adolescents compared to the parents, in particular on mental chronic diseases. Although prevalence rates of chronic diseases among ID-adolescents are very high, knowledge on this among teachers is limited. While information on chronic diseases in ID-adolescents is available among different informants, the disagreement between them reflects different points of view between the informants and probably indicates a lack of communication. The communication among teachers, parents and GPs should be improved to combine the knowledge and information on the presence of chronic diseases in ID-adolescents. This may provide opportunities to improve the support of these adolescents in their school career and in their transition from school to work.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2010 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2010.04.015