Care & Support Services - Achieving Best Practice
Person Centred Planning (PCP)
Person Centred Planning (PCP)
Person Centred Planning (PCP) is a method of supporting and working with individuals who have a learning disability. It empowers those with disabilities to take charge of the direction they would like their life to take.
Having a learning disability does not necessarily mean that an individual cannot achieve their aspirations and PCP allows control of these aspirations to be placed close to, or firmly with, the individual not the carer.
PCP does not suit every individual. Some learning disabilities make it difficult for the individual to take control of their future, but carers who use PCP will help to facilitate the various techniques involved. These include: - Essential lifestyle planning
- PATH
- MAP
- Personal futures planning
Each of these techniques are underpinned with similar values.
What is Person Centred Planning (PCP)
Person Centred Planning (PCP) is a method of supporting and working with people who have a learning disability, to empower them to be in charge of the direction of their life. It helps to work out what the individual wants from life, how best to achieve it, the kind of support a person will need and how it would be best given. Such ways of working should ultimately lead to greater social inclusion.
What is fundamentally different between this and other mainstream assessment processes is that the control is placed close to, or firmly with, the person with the learning disability and not with others.
Background to the emergence of Person Centred Planning
To understand the idea of PCP and what PCP programmes are currently trying to achieve, it may be useful to view how it differs from the way assessment and learning disability has been historically approached.
Many of the services and assessment procedures were previously 'agency focussed'. In other words, the agency decided the goals for individuals and set their learning targets. Skill audits were taken to identify strengths and needs, and skill acquisition was seen as the passport to social integration. Unfortunately, people got trapped in a 'readiness model' of care, particularly those with more severe or profound learning disabilities. This readiness approach required an individual to demonstrate pre-requisite skills before an activity or an experience could take place. Professionals (often excluding the service user) used multi-disciplinary meetings to decide on the next step for a person in an Individual Programme Planning process. People with learning disability became locked into a service world which paid most attention to functional skills and groomed compliant behaviour. Rarely were the wider aspects of personality development, personal aspiration and future plans acknowledged, all to the exclusion of a social identity.
Attempting to get a better understanding of their clients' needs appeared to lock professionals in clinical perceptions focussed around disability. Disability first - person second. Furthermore, these clinical perceptions of need invariably got linked to eligibility criteria. Most of the eligibility criteria were a way of 'gate keeping' resources and often screened people out of as much as into a service. In fact the more a professional focussed on the person's disability the more likely the individual was to not be allocated access resources. For most people, it was an inverse and negative way of helping. People were caught in a 'done to' and 'pathologising' assessment model, rather than a creative and participative experience helping to shape their current and future hopes.
Person Centred Planning
PCP puts the person at the centre of the process. It uses collaborative techniques to focus on the person's aspiration and future wishes, to drive their goals and plans for assistance and support.
There are various styles of PCP process, such as Essential Lifestyle Planning, PATH, MAPS and Personal Futures Planning, but all are underpinned by the following similar values:
- Everyone has the right to plan their own lives
- A person has the right to be at the centre of any planning that is done for them
- Everyone has the right to be part of their community
- A person has the right to live in the way they feel is right for them and to have the necessary support to allow them to do this in the way that they wish
PCP workers have usually taken the necessary training to become a facilitator in the various techniques used. The following is a snap shot of the main approaches:
- Essential Lifestyle Planning. Developed by Michael Smull and Susan Burke-Harrison. This approach views a person's current life and how it can be improved. It looks at what is important to a person and what is not working at present.
- PATH: Developed by Jack Pearpoint, Marsha Forest and John O'Brien. The facilitator uses a technique of visual graphics in focussing on the 'dream' of a person and works backwards from this positive future to seek out the actions required along the way to achieve it.
- MAP: Developed by Pearpoint, Forest and Judith Snow. This is similar to PATH using a graphic and picture building portrait. The content can include topics and information that represents a person's life so far, who the person is, their dream for the future, nightmare scenario, what the person needs now and a plan for action.
PCP can be described as a method of working with people through a process of continually listening and focussing on what is important to someone now and in the future. In facilitating this, it uses the support of the individual's friends, family and significant others. A person's capabilities will be fully recognised in order for the necessary support to be allocated to help the person achieve their wishes and aspirations. The way of usually achieving this will be through community participation and social inclusion.
