Improving Quality of Life
Our measure of independenceWhat does Quality of Life mean?
We wanted to know if the support we provide truly makes an impact in enhancing people’s quality of life, as well as what we’re doing well and how we could make our services even better.
At Forsight, we use a framework developed to describe quality of life by Dr Robert Schalock – a world-leading academic, researcher, writer, consultant and pioneer in the developmental disabilities movement.
Defined by Dr. Schalock’s framework, the three overarching factors contributing to one’s quality of life are linked to eight sub-domains:
- Independence (personal development, self-determination)
- Inclusion (interpersonal relations, social participation, rights)
- Wellbeing (emotional wellbeing, physical wellbeing, material wellbeing)
His framework fits well with our vision of supporting individuals with personalised care and goals to enhance their inclusion, independence and wellbeing.
Underpinned by over two decades of research, Dr Robert Schalock’s model is widely recognised within the disability field as a “mechanism for evaluation and assessment of programs and services” that is statistically robust.
Improving Quality of Life
To bring our vision to life of supporting every client with personalised care and goals, we focus our effort on our Quality of Life Framework dedicated to supporting independence, inclusion and wellbeing.
Our assessment framework allows to tangibly measure improvements or areas to focus on for each person. It is delivered through these four key pillars:
- Home Assessment: To ensure best practice benchmarks are met and improved for systems and practices within a home that affect a person’s quality of life.
- My Pathway Assessment: Observational assessment of individuals measured against the quality of life domains and indicators (Schalock and Verugo, 2002).
- My Pathway Goals: Setting and monitoring of an individual’s person-centred goals to achieve the quality of life outcomes.
- Training: Active Support and Quality of Life training underpins the framework by empowering staff with the skills to enable individuals to reach their goals around Independence, Inclusion and Wellbeing.
This is an adapted assessment framework based on the Schalock Quality of Life Model (Schalock, 2004; Schalock et al., 2002; Schalock et al., 2005).
Our Model of Care
Active Support is a way for people with disability to engage in meaningful everyday activities of their choice, with the amount of support they need. It is about doing “with” rather than doing “for” the person.
All our team at Forsight are titled Active Support Workers and are trained in the essential aspects of this model of care.
Active Support is based on evidence that:
- Engagement in activities and social relationships improves people’s quality of life
- Personal development is only possible when you participate in activities that broaden your experiences
- Social relationships and inclusion depend on interacting with other people
- Physical health depends on lifestyle and activity
- Greater engagement, choice and control can lead to decreases in behaviours of concern