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Purpose: Children with cerebral palsy who have associated feeding difficulties are at risk of aspiration and poor nutrition. This study aimed to measure the changes in knowledge, confidence, anxiety and behaviour among 25 Sri Lankan mothers with responsibility for feeding children diagnosed with cerebral palsy, after they attended an experiential workshop.

Method: Data collection was done through pre- and post-workshop questionnaires, observations and semi-structured interviews.

Results: There was a significant improvement in reported levels of knowledge and confidence and a decrease in the caregivers’ level of anxiety during mealtimes. The qualitative data analysis indicated changes in participant knowledge, particularly about the signs of aspiration and positioning during mealtimes. Observations showed better adherence to recommendations on communication, bolus size and utensils.

Conclusion: The findings support the utility of experiential training for caregivers, to ensure that children with cerebral palsy are fed safely.

Purpose: Recent conceptualisations of community based rehabilitation include empowerment of persons with disabilities as a key activity. This article reports on a study which explored the training of mid-level CBR workers in South Africa, with a specific focus on the ability of the course participants to address the oppression and empowerment of persons with disabilities.

Method: Over a three-year period, one cycle of action research was conducted in a non-government organisation that conducts mid-level CBR training in South Africa. Data collection methods included in-depth interviews with staff, students and past graduates of the course, document analysis, participatory rural appraisal techniques and two focus group discussions with the students’ clients.

Results: Personnel, who had been trained in CBR before the year 2003, were found to have some difficulty in explaining the social model of disability and the oppression of persons with disabilities at a cultural and structural level. It was noted that after changes were implemented in the CBR course, the students had an orientation to working with, rather than for, persons with disabilities. They began to understand the complexities of empowerment and also engaged in social action to address the oppression of persons with disabilities.

Conclusions: The CBR Guidelines require a new skill-mix in mid-level CBR personnel. This study illustrates a possible training approach which can contribute to the development of these skills.

Purpose: The ability to recognise emotions in oneself and in others is a fundamental prerequisite to function successfully in the social world. Emotion recognition deficit in people with learning disability may therefore be an important contributory factor to deficits in social skills and poor social adaptation. This study aimed to examine the level of emotional understanding in students with learning disabilities (LD).

Method: A pre-test, post-test equivalent groups design was adopted for this study. The focus was on identification of emotions through verbal and pictorial situations, and the appropriate expression of emotions. Training was provided to enhance the emotional understanding of students through the use of ‘I C ME’ module. The 6 emotions addressed in this study were anger, excitement, embarrassment, jealousy, love and anxiety. 30 children with LD, in the age group of 9-12 years, were selected for the study.

Results: It was seen that while children with LD had difficulty in the identification of an emotion, they found it more difficult to express the emotion in a socially appropriate way. The post-test results indicated that the training provided to the students significantly improved their emotional understanding.

Conclusions: The students learnt about the 6 emotions (anger, excitement, embarrassment, love, jealousy, and anxiety), the vocabulary associated with these emotions, and also the appropriate way to express, self-monitor and self-regulate each emotion.

Limitations: Intervention was done for only 6 emotions

Through its disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) seeks to protect livelihoods from shocks, to make food production systems more resilient and more capable of absorbing the impact of, and recovering from, disruptive events. The FAO Disaster Risk Reduction for Food and Nutrition Security Framework Programme (DRR for FNS) serves to support and provide strategic direction, to FAO member countries and partners, for the implementation of Disaster Risk Reduction for Food and Nutrition Security programmes. The goal is to enhance the resilience of livelihoods against threats and emergencies to ensure the FNS of vulnerable farmers, fishers, herders, foresters and other at risk groups

The AIDS and Disability Partners Forum at the UN General Assembly High Level Meetings on AIDS in New York in June 2011 and the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC in July 2012 underscore the attention to the impact of HIV and AIDS on persons with disabilities. However, research on AIDS and disability, particularly a solid evidence base upon which to build policy and programming remains thin, scattered and difficult to access. In this review paper, we summarise what is known about the intersection between HIV and AIDS and disability, paying particular attention to the small but emerging body of epidemiology data on the prevalence of HIV for people with disabilities, as well as the increasing understanding of HIV risk factors for people with disabilities. We find that the number of papers in the peer-reviewed literature remains distressingly small. Over the past 20 years an average of 5 articles on some aspect of disability and HIV and AIDS were published annually in the peer-reviewed literature from 1990 to 2000, increasing slightly to an average of 6 per year from 2000 to 2010. Given the vast amount of research around HIV and AIDS and the thousands of articles on the subject published in the peer-reviewed literature annually, the continuing lack of attention to HIV and AIDS among this at risk population, now estimated to make up 15% of the world's population, is striking. However, the statistics, while too limited at this point to make definitive conclusions, increasingly suggest at least an equal HIV prevalence rate for people with disabilities as for their non-disabled peers.