Options Development Plan, , August 2006 - March 2008
"Turning Dreams into Reality"
Mark Twain wrote “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re bound to end up somewhere else”.
Valuing People and much research since suggests that people with learning disabilities still have to put up with significantly poorer quality of life than those without disabilities. For virtually every indicator of health and well-being the statistics for people with disabilities is worse than for those without disabilities. This suggests that support organisations like Options should have a very clear sense of “where we need to be going” and “where we are going”.
For Options our Development Plan is a statement of where we are heading and what we need to do to get there. It is a process for ensuring that we take stock and consider how things have gone over the last few years, critically evaluating how we are doing and setting challenges for the period ahead.
Our starting point is each person we support and his/her unique wishes, aspirations, likes and dislikes. Our starting point is a passionately held belief that people with learning disabilities have the same aspirations and wishes as the rest of us, and the right as citizens to these. Our starting point is that we need a fantastic, dedicated and committed staff team, empowered to support people well.
Options has expanded significantly over the last two years now supporting 100 people in all, 39 in supported living, and less intensively in what we call Outreach. We now have some 200 staff and contracts with our eight main purchasers totalling £4.2m.
We anticipate very limited growth over the next two years, and do not expect to support many more than the 100 people we currently support. We believe small is beautiful and that support is best provided in an organisation where people know each other, where people we support can drop into the office and chat to and be known by office staff, and where names are more important than titles. The tough part of making that decision is that we may have to say no to new opportunities to support people, and instead invest our energies in making sure we improve the quality of support we provide to people we already support.
The result is this development plan laying out eleven key objectives for us over the next 2 years these are to:
In the main body of the development plan you will find the detailed planning and actions which we believe will enable us to achieve these objectives. It is always difficult to prioritise. One wants to make sure everything happens tomorrow. Sadly that sort of planning rarely leads to success. What we hope and believe is that the successful delivery of this development plan will ensure that Options provides brilliant support, and that people we support will have a quality of life of which we would want for ourselves.
Whatever the future holds we are committed to using all resources available to us to maximise the quality of life and experiences of people we support, providing staff with a great job, ensuring families see people really well supported and purchasers happy that the funding they provide is well spent.
Responsibility for implementation and delivery of the plan lies primarily with Options’ Leadership Team, and ultimately with the trustees, of Options. The plan can only be successfully delivered with the commitment and involvement of great staff, empowered to work effectively. It is based on a desire to maximise the skills and abilities of staff for the benefit of people we support, the staff themselves and Options as an organisation.
The development plan will be monitored on a monthly basis through leadership team meetings. It would be a real surprise if everything went perfectly. We will update and refine the plan as we learn.
We are at a very exciting and challenging stage of Options development. There is still only a handful of genuine supported living agencies in the UK, of which Options is one. We do know where we are going and hope and trust that in two years time, a delivered plan will have taken us further towards ensuring people we support live their lives to the full.
Richard Williams
Chief Executive
The full text of this Development Plan, including our action plan, is available for download below.
| Attachment | Size |
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| Development Plan 2006-7.doc | 228.5 KB |