Outcomes for Adults With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Receiving Long-Term Services and Supports: A Systematic Review of the Literature.

van der Miesen et al. (2024) read every paper they could find on long-term services for adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities. They hunted for studies that measured any real-life outcome: health, housing, jobs, friends, or daily skills.

They did not pool numbers. Instead they sorted the outcomes into piles to see which ones researchers actually track.

The team found 200-plus studies, but the measures were all over the map. Some used quality-of-life surveys, others counted hospital visits, and many just described the service itself.

No clear picture emerged. The field still cannot say which supports really help adults live better lives.

Navas et al. (2025) tell a brighter story. Their quasi-experiment showed large gains in quality of life when adults moved from institutions to community homes. van der Miesen et al. (2024) include that study, yet their wider scan shows most papers stop at describing the move, not measuring life after.

Vassos et al. (2016) found modest gains from person-centred planning, but again only for choice-making, not jobs or health. van der Miesen et al. (2024) confirm that employment and aging outcomes are rarely tracked, matching the warning from Walton (2016) that geriatric-ID care is a ‘non-issue’ in most datasets.

Hithersay et al. (2014) add another gap: no carer-led health intervention has solid evidence. van der Miesen et al. (2024) show researchers are still not testing those models in real-world services.

If you write goals for adults with IDD, you now have a menu of outcomes that science barely touches. Pick one missing piece—say, preventive health or aging—and start measuring it. Use simple pre-post data: doctor visits, falls, or social contacts. Your small dataset could become the evidence the next review needs.