We were delighted to receive confirmation of funding of €200,000 under the Strengthening Disability Services Grant Funding through the Department of Health and Health Service Executive. We were successful under two proposals; Strand 1: ‘Improving person-centred delivery in line with Transforming Lives’ and Strand 3: ‘Initiatives towards building sustainable organisations’.
Improving person-centred delivery in line with Transforming Lives
The Transforming Lives Programme drives innovation in disability services; person centred planning is a crucial component of this which also fits with ‘meaningful outcome’s which is one of our goals under our Strategic Plan 2019-2023. Current person centred processes and practices in Ability West are based on an initial policy created in 2013. Since then, training has been impacted by budget restraints and there has been a level of staff turnover which has resulted in person centred approaches being inconsistent across services. Ability West is highly motivated to update and renew our policy, practice and staff skill set in keeping with current best practice. The desired outcome will be that adults and children availing of Ability West’s services will be supported in an individualised way to achieve meaningful outcomes, regardless of their circumstances or complexity of support needs. It will also enable continued meaningful strategic planning for the future growth of our services.
Person centred planning adds greater value and meaning to outcomes experienced by people we support, enabling them to live ordinary lives and experience a good quality of life, to enjoy and benefit from the supports and services they receive from Ability West. It will enhance supports currently on offer to some, such as Supported Self-Directed Living (SSDL), but will positively benefit every person accessing all services across the lifespan. Strategically, Ability West will have enhanced planning and decision making processes for the delivery of supports now and into the future to support changing needs (across the lifespan), complex behaviour support needs, and preventing the breakdown of a family living arrangement, all of which have significantly challenged service delivery in recent years and increased corporate risks.
Initiatives towards building sustainable organisations’
Ability West has identified a new rostering system and reporting/analytics tool which will greatly enhance our management information systems and eliminate time-consuming manual back office functions in our HR and Finance departments. The tools, Workforce Management (Rosters module) and a new reporting tool Insights, are available from our current systems provider, CoreHR. Their potential adoption by Ability West is seen as a game-changer for the provision auto-generating rostering capability and provision of real-time data, which will build in the ability to make cost-saving decisions and in so doing provide capacity to release resources to frontline services when and where required. Our current approach to data analysis is in particular retrospective, which very often means that for an organisation of our significant size, the opportunities for the optimisation of resources is unnecessarily delayed. The collective benefit will be to enable strategic, proactive, cost-saving decisions in real-time, rather than retrospectively examining workforce finance patterns as is our current capability.