The ‘placement’ of people with profound impairments across the lifespan: re-thinking age criteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Advances in lifesaving technologies and treatments make it possible for children with profound physical and cognitive impairments to survive into adulthood. Questions regarding how and where they should live are discussed rarely and, when they are, primarily focus on safety and/or containing costs. Since models of long-term care provision are age-based, children who reside in institutions are 'discharged' to adult facilities when they reach an arbitrary age. Such transfers may not be in the best interests of these young people or their families. Our aim in this debate is to highlight why age is a problematic criterion for placement decisions, with the goal of stimulating further research and inquiry. DISCUSSION: Transfers from pediatric to adult institutions are driven primarily by funding arrangements and underpinned by stage-based theories of human development. Arguments supporting such transfers point to the value of communal living with same age peers, and engagement in age-appropriate activities. These goals are questionable for individuals who are minimally interactive and/or where equally worthy interactions are feasible in intergenerational settings. Instead their accommodation needs might more closely align with palliative care principles of supporting individuals and families to enjoy what they bring to each other's lives and minimize suffering. Innovative models of 'vertical care' and 'lifetime homes', which enable continuous flexible services across the lifespan, are discussed as examples of alternative approaches requiring further debate and research. SUMMARY: Entrenched funding and service models that require the transfer of profoundly impaired young people from pediatric to adult facilities need to be re-examined with considerations of best interests, needs, and preferences of individuals and their families. Questions of what constitutes a 'good life' for these individuals are tenacious and require further thought and research. Nevertheless, they need to be regarded as citizens of our human community deserving of a good life in whatever form that may take, in settings that enable them to flourish.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".