PANS can have a significant and often sudden impact on a person’s ability to participate in everyday life. Symptoms can emerge abruptly, and can fluctuate in severity leading to challenges in functioning across home, school, work and social settings.
Impact on Education
- Sudden onset of severe anxiety, OCD, or intrusive thoughts can make attending school overwhelming or impossible.
- Cognitive difficulties—including problems with memory, attention, processing speed, and executive function—can impair learning and academic performance.
- Motor or sensory changes, handwriting deterioration, or tics may affect classroom participation.
- Fatigue, sleep disruption, and emotional dysregulation can lead to frequent absences or reduced capacity to engage.
Impact on Work
- Adults and older adolescents may struggle with concentration, task initiation, organisation, and decision‑making, affecting reliability and productivity.
- Acute anxiety, panic, or OCD symptoms can interfere with attending work or completing routine tasks.
- Fluctuating symptoms may make consistent performance difficult, leading to reduced hours, sick leave, or the need for workplace adjustments.
Impact on Daily Living
- Everyday tasks—such as washing, dressing, eating, or leaving the house—can become challenging due to sensory sensitivities, compulsions, or overwhelming distress.
- Emotional lability and behavioural changes can strain family life and relationships.
- Sleep disturbance, pain, and fatigue can reduce stamina for normal routines.
- Some individuals may experience regression in skills, requiring additional support with tasks they previously managed independently.
Why Person‑Centred Support Is Essential
Given the complexity and variability of PANS, individuals benefit most from flexible, person‑centred support that adapts to their symptoms, strengths, and changing needs. This includes understanding the medical basis of the condition, providing appropriate educational or workplace adjustments, and ensuring compassionate, coordinated care across services. Person‑centred approaches help stabilise functioning, reduce distress, and support recovery while maintaining dignity and inclusion.
The PANS+ GIRFEC Toolkit
The Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) National Practice Model provides a clear, structured framework that helps professionals analyse the full impact of PANS on an individual’s functioning and identify the supports required. The model supports practitioners to systematically explore how an individual’s symptoms can affect them across employment or learning, health, emotional regulation, relationships, and day‑to‑day participation. This can then be used to support multi‑agency decision‑making, highlight risks and unmet needs, and determine possible supports for an individual’s unique challenges.
While GIRFEC is a policy for supporting children and young people, these same principles can be applied to adults with PANS, and the indicators for health and wellbeing can equally apply to adults as they do to children and young people.
PANS+ Scotland are developing a toolkit to support professionals working with people with PANS. It is being developed through the NHS Education for Scotland Digital Leadership Programme. Resources will be added to the toolkit as they are developed.