Disease Prevention and Health Promotion

Human services settings for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) must adopt disease prevention and health promotion strategies for ensuring safe environments, reducing illnesses, and mitigating risk of infections in the workplace. This chapter reviews skills teaching with children and adults, interventions directed at care providers, and large-scale program design for decreasing the spread of illnesses and infectious diseases. Several behavior analytic and behavior-based safety practices with good evidence support have focused primarily on wearing personal protective equipment (PPE), hand hygiene, and cleaning-disinfecting the physical environment. Much of the representative research emerged at the onset and during sequelae of the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. Procedural considerations and recommendations are discussed.