Ronnie’s wish was to control his finances

We believe that people with learning disabilities are at their core the same as you and I. They want to have love in their lives, to have friendships, meaningful things to do, fun and laughter, and it is our job to support them to achieve these. It is also our job to support them when their decision-making goes wrong and life generally is unhappy. Sometimes because of their disabilities and because of our reaction to their disabilities, it is difficult to achieve the things that are important to them. Thus it might be difficult to build friendships because people with disabilities haven’t developed the social skills to help them communicate well, because we as staff do things for people and don’t ‘let’ them do things for themselves (we protect and do for) and because the community is often fearful of people who are different from them. It is our job, our challenge and our opportunity to support, empower and enable people to achieve the things they want to achieve.

Edel’s wish was to learn how to cook

That means that we will need to support people with disabilities to develop skills to do things for themselves. We have to look at ourselves and make sure we are enablers, not carers and that we are prepared to risk-take. We need to find people in our communities prepared to step out and do things differently – to build relationships. Someone may be a bit scared of people with disabilities but as long as they share an interest in fishing, Laurel and Hardy, or Take That then the fear might be overcome.

Paul’s wish was to go on a red open top bus in London

As an organisation we need to have the highest aspirations for the people we support achieving what they want in their lives. If we don’t, then in all likelihood people will end up achieving less than they might have done.  Sometimes staff say “well John has no aspirations to do this or that – he is happy as he is.” That may be true, but if we believe that people with disabilities are the same as you and I, then why are they content with their lot? Often it is because they know of no other opportunities, because they have never experienced anything different, or have never been introduced to new possibilities. It is our responsibility to introduce new possibilities and new experiences for people. (It’s the section in the Team Action Plan called Best Guess – which is our best guess of the things people might want to do, but because of their limited ability to communicate and our limited ability to understand, is not specifically identified by the person).

So person centred means:

Rob’s wish was to go to Spain

• Holding the same aspirations for people we support as for ourselves
• Listening carefully (using ears, eyes and heart) to what they want in their lives
• Supporting them to achieve what they want for themselves with as little support from us as possible (that’s the enabling bit)
• Measuring our success based only on people we support achieving the outcomes they want.

We write down what we’ve heard about what someone wants and doesn’t want in a person centred plan – what Options calls an Essential Lifestyle Plan or ELP for short. The Team Action Plan turns their wishes into actions for staff to make sure the wishes aren’t pipe dreams but come true!