Person-centred Lifestyles for People with Intellectual Disabilities: Transforming attitudes, services and practice

This simple but powerful staff and service development exercise provides a vital stimulus to exploring and evaluating attitudes, services and practice in relation to people with intellectual disability and the quality of lives they are enabled to lead. It can be used with any group of stakeholders, in any kind of service – whether public, private or voluntary – and in any country of the world. Whatever the nature of the organisation and the cultural context, the exercise offers a way of holding existing attitudes, practices, systems and structures ‘up to the light’, in order to ensure that they meet the values we would espouse for our own lives and those of our families and loved ones. The aim is not only to guard against the violation of human rights and to meet minimum standards imposed by regulatory bodies, but also to make genuine progress towards creating consistent person-centred responses – individualised, flexible, and self-directed, and clearly based on human values of dignity, respect and equality. The exercises can be used for a wide range of purposes, including developing a vision for a new service and/or values statement, designing or changing services, including environments, systems and staffing, changing problematic cultures, preparing for inspection, introducing more person-centred ways of thinking and planning, meeting and monitoring quality standards and codes of practice, staff induction and development. This pack contains an A4 manual with full instructions and examples for running the exercises; DVD containing slides and clips of filmed training sessions and slides, 132 discussion cards and 12 header cards.