Young people with complex support needs frequently experience multiple intersecting forms of disadvantage including experiences of violence, abuse and neglect, housing instability and homelessness, problematic substance use, exclusion from education, and contact with the criminal justice system. Many of these young people have mental health, cognitive disability and/or other health issues that also impact on their lives. These young people need to navigate multiple, diverse, and often difficult transitions between services, adding to the existing chaos in their lives. This article explores the experiences of young people with complex support needs in transition, specifically young people's viewpoints and experiences of supports they receive from paid professionals. This qualitative study used body mapping research methods and in-depth interviews with 38 young people aged 16 to 26 years in three Australian states. Helpful and trusting paid relationships could serve as an anchor to young people during complex transitions and other highly turbulent life periods. These relationships were contingent on a deep and non-judgmental knowing of the young person, contributed constructive outcomes and stability in young people's lives, and for some young people, had 'life-saving' effects. These findings present opportunities and challenges for policymakers and practitioners to balance the tensions between authentic relationship-based work with young people and risk-averse, economically-driven imperatives in contemporary youth service provision.

While the attainment of late life represents a significant achievement for people with an intellectual disability, increased life expectancy has resulted in growing concerns about the extent to which disability service providers are ready to meet the changing needs of increasing numbers of older people and facilitate their ongoing social inclusion. Training of frontline disability staff is widely accepted as an effective strategy for increasing organisational capacity to contribute to improved quality of life for people with an intellectual disability. The study identifies training needs analyses and 'ready-to-deliver' training programs for frontline disability services staff working with adults with an intellectual disability who are ageing, assesses whether the training programs contribute to improved quality of life outcomes for service users, and makes recommendations for future research and development of training for disability services staff who work with older people with intellectual disability.

The current study employed ethnographic methodology to explore the nature and use of knowledge by 26 disability support workers who supported older people with an intellectual disability living at three supported accommodation services in metropolitan south-east Queensland. This paper presents one vignette from the larger ethnography entitled “Katie’s story: The final voyage”. Katie’s story describes how, after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Katie’s support team responded to her profound and intensifying need from within existing resources, developing an embedded, practitioner-constructed, place-based knowledge that enabled Katie to die-in-place with dignity. Findings from the ethnography identified that – in the face of multi-faceted dilemma, systems constraint, and continually shifting complexity – disability support workers accessed a range of knowledges which they synthesised and translated into a unique, dynamic, responsive, and actionable locale knowledge for the purpose of supporting the unique and changing needs of older people with an intellectual disability. Findings from the research challenge current understandings of disability support worker knowledge as deficient, instead identifying worker ways of knowing as highly targeted, person-centred, and constituting place-based responses to the everyday contingencies and dilemmas of support. Findings from the study have implications for the professional development of disability support workers in their efforts to optimise social inclusion with and for people with an intellectual disability.

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While the attainment of late life represents a significant achievement for people with an intellectual disability, increased life expectancy has resulted in growing concerns about the extent to which disability service providers are ready to meet the changing needs of increasing numbers of older people and facilitate their ongoing social inclusion. Training of frontline disability staff is widely accepted as an effective strategy for increasing organisational capacity to contribute to improved quality of life for people with an intellectual disability. The study identifies training needs analyses and ‘ready-to-deliver’ training programs for frontline disability services staff working with adults with an intellectual disability who are ageing, assesses whether the training programs contribute to improved quality of life outcomes for service users, and makes recommendations for future research and development of training for disability services staff who work with older people with intellectual disability.