Optimal Individual Service Design – 2012

A Brief Description Of An Intensive Course On “Optimal Service Design

This course has been developed due to the ongoing difficulty faced by many consumers, families, advocates, staff, funders, and organizations to be able to develop services that are authentically effective in meeting people’s needs, and that can be implemented in relation to conventional organizational conditions. It is commonly the case that people often want this result, but are stymied when it comes to evolving service models and strategies that are both in accord with the person’s needs and viable in the usual bureaucratic environments of services. Of particular interest in the course is the problem of innovation as it relates to the construct of unique service models “from scratch” that may lack local, or even national precedents, to serve as a guide.

The course relies heavily on a framework of analysis first pioneered by Dr Wolf Wolfensberger, of Syracuse University called “model coherency analysis”. This will be combined with many derivatives of this initial work as it relates to quality of service. The event will examine many contemporary subjects pertinent to optimal service including but not restricted to:

  • The nature of quality
  • The role of assumptions in determining needs
  • Establishing fundamentality in needs
  • Meeting needs normatively
  • Defining “person-centredness”
  • Appropriate and supported use of generic and natural supports
  • The role of personal vulnerabilities and intentional safeguards
  • Understanding how empowerment can be put into operation
  • Clarifying pertinent theories and how they are embodied in models
  • Understanding how service design can done jointly “with” consumers, families and cultural groups rather than done “to” or “at” them
  • Costing, structural and management strategies and judgement
  • Serving “difficult to serve” persons
  • Building in the capacity to modify service practice on an ongoing basis
  • Exploring the ethics of “right relationship”
  • Searching for answers in people’s lives on an ongoing basis rather than having them “once and for all”

The course takes place over two weeks in January and February 2012 – Jan 9-13th and Jan 30 – Feb 3 in the Education Room at BCACL in New Westminster.

For more information, contact aaron@spectrumsociety.org

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