Person-centred
Person-centred|Lifelong Pathways
Person-centred: there is a lot of talk about person-centred approaches to support people living with disability in to good valued lives. But what does this mean and how can a service provider achieve it?
With the implementation of the NDIA, there is a lot of movement within service providers in Australia, there are lots of organisations that are merging, or talking about merging. The change from supports being block funded, to the person with disability having an individualised funding package is triggering a lot of this change.
But how do service providers deliver person-centred approaches? The truth is that many of them don’t. They have packages from which a person with disability must choose. This is not person-centred; it is finding a pre-existing model that best fits your needs, but probably won’t meet all of them. Therefore, the person with disability must compromise on one or more aspects of what they need.
I recently had the most serendipitous opportunity to attend the Deep Quality Optimal Individualised Service Design Course facilitated by Dr Michael Kendrick. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I am so grateful to The Community Living Project Inc. for supporting me to attend. The course has been offered in many countries and in multiple languages.
The course aims to bridge the gap between what service providers hope to deliver and what is realistic for them to deliver. There is a significant theoretical component, because individual needs have to be considered before you can assist them. In other words, to implement a person-centred approach.
The topics covered included:
- how to discern and assess needs accurately and meet them in a normative and inclusive manner;
- long-term supports for social inclusion;
- the role of judgement in service design;
- serving people who may be considered challenging in their needs; and
- the effect of social devaluation on needs and identity.
As you can see there are some topics that are challenging and confronting. This is certainly true of the course and was highlighted when I had the opportunity to work with our focus individual. Course participants were grouped into teams and we are all afforded the opportunity to work with a person with disability who was open to our proposal of how to engage them to give them a good life. That is not to say that their life wasn’t already good, but to identify how it could be better. The focus individual’s family generously let us into their lives and gave us their time so that we could put what we were learning into practice.
Can I just say, firstly, that it was an absolute honour and pleasure to work collaboratively with the other members of the team. Bringing together our expertise and different perspectives was one of the most insightful aspects of the course. None of us knew each other prior to the course. On only the second evening of the course we went the house of our focus individual. It was a bit like being thrown in the deep end but it was all part of the experience and opportunity. You can choose to sink or to swim. How you approach this opportunity will influence what you gain and learn from it.
For me, personally, I viewed it as a once in a lifetime chance, coming at an incredible time when my business is in its first year. The possibility of me making a big difference to how I can support a family was tangible; and I grabbed it with both hands.
I have a much greater appreciation of what a person-centred approach actually means. It requires delving under the surface to understand the person’s needs in all domains of life. These can be fundamental aspects like mobility and communication. It is also, however, includes deeper aspects such as relationships and social inclusion.
I would like to thank the Community Living Project Inc. for supporting me to do this and the Julia Farr Association Inc. for hosting the event. Without their generous assistance this would not have been possible.
For more information on both of the organisations that hosted this event, please go to the following links: