Individual Support Plans: enhancing personal outcomes

Abstract

For organizations providing supports to persons with intellectual disability it is their main task to enhance the quality of life of their clients. Individual Support Plans should be designed with this goal in mind. Consequently, important questions in writing an ISP are: 1) What does the person want?, and 2) Which support does the person need? The outcome should obviously be a good quality of life.Furthermore we emphasize in our work the importance of evidence-based practices. Based on these starting points we propose the following guideliness for an ISP. An ISP should:– Explore goals and personal perspectives: what does a person want in his life.– Explore what support a person needs and wants: which supports are important for and which are important to the person.– Formulate support strategies in answer to the personal goals, wants and needs.– Monitor in dialogue with the person the process of support.– Measure personal outcomes.– Comprise an ongoing system of finetuning and adjusting.– Use evidence based practices in doing so.– Be transparant and comprehensible for the person.Following these guideliness we developed an internet based ISP in which the eight QOL dimensions provide the framework for developing support strategies, the dialogue with the client is build into the system of supports, and evidence based instruments are used to measure support needs and personal outcomes.

Keywords

• prácticas basadas en la evidencia, calidad de vida
• planes individuales de apoyo
• resultados personales
• equipos de alto rendimiento