Healthy lifestyle of people with intellectual disabilities

A healthy lifestyle is important in several ways, however living healthy is difficult. It is even more difficult for people with intellectual disabilities to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle. In the Netherlands these people often live or work within healthcare organizations. Promoting and supporting a healthy lifestyle is an important part of healthcare support. However, it has proved very difficult in practice to consistently introduce developed programs into daily support. The aim of this research was to contribute to the implementation of healthy lifestyle within healthcare organizations. Scientifically substantiated points for improvement and a set of questionnaires were provided for this.

The developed set of questionnaires consists of a checklist with the essential criteria for implementation of lifestyle interventions, the supplemented Measuring Instrument to measure Determinants of Innovations (MIDI) for evaluation of lifestyle interventions aimed at people with intellectual disabilities and a short, practical questionnaire to measure the attitude about supporting healthy exercise of direct support persons. All aspects and the set of measuring instruments were integrated in a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.
The questionnaires can be used to gain insight into the improvement points of the lifestyle approach of organizations. The MIDI can support in the development and evaluation of interventions. And with the attitude questionnaire, courses for direct support persons can be used and developed in a more targeted manner. It is recommended to use the set of questionnaires in a process of recurring attention within a network approach. This can continuously improve the quality of healthy lifestyle support.