Person Centred Planning (PCP) is a method of supporting and working with individuals who have a learning disability. It empowers those with disabilities to take charge of the direction they would like their life to take, it helps to work out what the individual wants from life, how best to achieve it, the type of support needed, and how it would be best given.

We do this in many ways; through one-to-one meetings with the individual, multidisciplinary meetings; ensuring the service user is very much involved, we encourage both families and friends to be involved and to give support wherever possible and wherever needed.

We use a variety of aids and tools to enable the individual to achieve their goals and to have their needs met, such as Personal Portfolios, Action Plans, Personal Futures Planning and Essential Lifestyle Planning. We facilitate and support this by using whatever format the individual can use and understand, Written Word, Makaton, Photographs, Pic Sims, Audio and Video/DVD.

Having a learning disability does not necessarily mean that an individual cannot achieve their aspirations and PCP allows control of these aspirations to be placed close to, or firmly with, the individual not the support staff.

We believe that all the service users we support have the right to plan their own lives, and to be at the centre of any planning that gives them the ability to be part of their own community and to enable them to live their life the way they feel is right for them, ensuring that they have necessary support to achieve this.

PCP can be described as a method of working with people through a process of continually listening and focusing on what is important to them both now and in the future.

In facilitating this, we use the support of the individual’s friends, family and significant others, which may include; Health Professionals, Advocates, Support Staff, Key workers and Care Managers/Social Workers.

A person’s capabilities will be fully recognised in order for the necessary support to be allocated to help the person achieve their wishes and aspirations. The usual way of achieving this will be through community participation and social inclusion.