The Vanderbilt Kennedy Center (VKC) is proud to share a new toolkit to encourage researchers to better include individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in their research. The Informed Consent Process for Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities is designed to provide strategies to make the informed consent process go more smoothly for research participants with IDD.
Individuals with IDD are often excluded from health-related research. Exclusion from research leads to reduced quality of health care and unknown treatment effectiveness. This contributes to overall health disparities in this population. One of the often-perceived barriers to inclusion of research participants with IDD is the informed consent process. The toolkit aims to provide strategies to make this an easier and more successful process for the researcher and their research participants with IDD. Click here to access a free PDF of the toolkit.
This publication was edited, designed, and produced by the Clinical Translational and the Administrative Cores of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), with research coordinator Kasey Fitzpatrick spearheading the project.
The Informed Consent Process for Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities is free to the public, as are all VKC printable resources, unless otherwise noted, and accessible via download.
Click here to access the Informed Consent Process toolkit.