Brelsford, V.L., Dimolareva, M, Gee, N.R. and Meints, K (2020) 'Best practice standards in animal-assisted interventions: how the LEAD risk assessment tool can help.' Animals, 10 (6). e974. ISSN 2076-2615
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Abstract
Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) in educational and other settings have steadily increased over the last fifty years and a steep rise in AAI has been observed in many countries and settings in recent years. Surprisingly, while different providers and organisations provide a range of guidelines, no unified, standardised guidelines or risk assessment tools for AAI exist. This means that in practice AAI takes place in an unregulated manner and without a gold standard of best practice. In addition, knowledge of which interventions are effective is still scarce and the mechanisms of successful interventions are not yet fully understood. This is partly due to AAI being a relatively new research field and standards of research and practice have often lacked rigour in the past. Furthermore, knowledge and experience of providers undertaking interventions varies greatly as there is no standardised training either. We address the striking lack of standardised guidelines and procedures. In all AAI, high importance should be placed on safety and welfare of all involved. Children and other AAI participants, staff and animals should be given equal consideration when assessing risks and welfare needs. To ensure safe AAI worldwide, we provide urgently needed guidelines on best practice in relation to risk assessment, safeguarding and animal welfare priorities. The guidelines were developed for a large-scale longitudinal, randomised controlled trial AAI project and are relevant to AAIs within educational and other settings. We also provide the first set of comprehensive risk assessment and animal welfare tools to achieve consistent welfare and safety standards for best practice across educational and other settings around the world.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Note: | This article is open access and is also available to read at the URL above. This article belongs to the special issue entitled 'Working Methods in the Field of Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT), Activities (AAA), and Education (AAE): An Open Discussion'. |
| Keywords: | animal-assisted interventions, dog-assisted interventions, safety standards, risk assessment tool, risk assessment, risk, best practice recommendations |
| Divisions: | School of Sciences |
| Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10060974 |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Nov 2021 19:05 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Nov 2021 19:05 |
| URI / Page ID: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/14326 |
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