Expanding Professionalism in Direct Support
Board member Carol Britton Laws spoke at the College of Direct Support's National Advisory Board meeting in Miami last month.
National advisers to the College of Direct Support gathered in Miami last month to share ideas for reaching the growing number of family caregivers, direct support professionals (DSPs), and others supporting people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD) through self-directed services.
Self-direction gives people receiving supports the decision-making authority and responsibility for employing people to provide the long-term services and supports that will help most in achieving the lives they want to live. They have the same duty to select, train, and retain their staff as any other employer. It is an alternative to traditional IDD services, for which provider agencies recruit, hire, and manage staff. Frequently, under self-direction, people with IDD hire close family members to provide some or all of their support services.
The College of Direct Support and the College of Frontline Supervision, Management, and Leadership provide accredited training and certification for professionals who support people with IDD, including DSPs, their supervisors, managers, and organizational leaders. The curricula are available through DirectCourse , an online learning management platform, in a longstanding partnership between Elsevier and the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration.
At the recent National Advisory Board meeting, participants discussed the intersecting training and development needs of caregivers who are being professionally trained to deliver services and those who are family or friends of people receiving support. They also discussed what states may need as they implement more self-directed services within their Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) programs, said Barbara Kleist, co-director of DirectCourse.
“Being an early provider of this content allowed us to reflect on and discuss with advisers what’s needed now in bringing the right training to family members and others in self-directed services,” Kleist said. “We discussed the intersection of priorities among people using self-directed services who want to maximize choice and control with the federal or state responsibility for identifying strong credentialing, highlighting DSP career paths, and applying ethics codes.” Content on the DirectCourse platform addresses these relevant issues for a wide variety of support providers.
The meeting was also an opportunity to think about how the field can help address the lack of state and national standards for self-direction, said Susan O’Nell, director of learning strategy.
“This gap makes it difficult for states to monitor the support being offered, even though the expectation under HCBS services is for these services to provide person-centered choices and support living fully in the community,” O’Nell said. “If family and friends haven’t been trained on these concepts, it’s hard to provide that kind of support. At the same time, we need to understand the strengths these caregivers bring and the power of self-direction, so it’s a matter of balancing those influences.”
Meeting participants discussed other challenges and opportunities that self-direction brings, highlighting the importance of training for all caregivers, regardless of their relationship to the person receiving support.
“Addressing complex issues such as expanding professionalism in self-directed services highlights the ongoing need for innovative thought leadership in direct support,” said ICI Director Amy Hewitt. “This event brings together the top researchers, educators, and advocates in our field, and other professionals from within and beyond ICI, who are steeped in the values of inclusion, to point the field toward better lives for people with IDD.”