ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the issues in organising the therapy professions in community learning disability services and offers a 'showcase' for some of the leading-edge practice developed in recent years in the Manchester Joint Service. The Health Service has failed to train and retain sufficient therapy professionals. Moreover, for reasons that remain obscure; work with learning-disabled people appears to be unattractive to many therapists. The chapter illustrates the variety of contributions made by therapy staff to the work of the service. An increasing number of referrals for eating, drinking and swallowing assessments for adults created a need for the speech and language therapists to develop written guidance for parents and carers assisting the individual person to eat and drink. The eating and drinking questionnaire was devised at the quality circle meetings to guide written collation of all the relevant information.
