Direct Support From A Manager S Viewpoint

DIRECT SUPPORT from a manager's Viewpoint is about answering the frequent how-to questions of direct support. It offers completely new approaches to working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (special needs) by clearly providing readers with understanding of routines, of dealing with challenges arising from individual uniqueness, and of an easy-to-master art of engagement in a way that makes practical application of the new approaches possible. The book utilizes real-life direct support scenarios to demonstrate ways of developing and delivering individualized staff actions, and applying the Opportunity Approach to understand and empower a person with special needs. Through enriched visuals and diagrams, the book tackles and demystifies the harder questions of the capacity-preference disparities, providing readers with navigation techniques and the golden rule of deriving preferences for those people who cannot overtly express their needs. The book also makes it easier to appreciateof working with any given direct support situation by equipping readers with ways to initiate and maintain direct interaction through stimulation and opportunity leads by concisely highlighting the context, the process, the problem and solution of typical direct support encounters. The book was inspired by a direct support professional whose newness but demonstrated interest in the field led her to ask many questions and quest to know everything from the context of support, to the process and approach of delivery, to the outcome of direct support, and wanting to know why direct support outcomes themselves are not independently usable until they are further investigated and applied to the developing realities of the special needs person. Most books on working with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities only provide general advice. On the other hand, subject specific references offer only policy-centric interpretation of the direct support process, but fail to explain the overall contexts of what actually takes place on the ground or provide any problem-solving process. This book does all threeit provides the context, the process, and problem resolution. Written by a manager who grew through the ranks of direct support, this book is an invaluable guide to what really works in direct support. It utilizes real situations that happened during actual direct support process to explain concepts and approaches to navigating, handling and resolving similar situations should it occurred elsewhere in the helping relationship.

This monograph constitutes the final report of the EC-sponsored PRISM project, which was devoted to communications management for integrated broadband communications (IBC) within the RACE program. The book introduces and applies the distributed management framework (DMF) developed for the specification and design of multi-domain management systems for controlling, monitoring, and administrating IBC networks. The DMF framework is evaluated in detail and related to other international architectural and specification work aimed at creating advanced communication management systems. Also, a summary of existing platforms potentially supporting PRISM's DMF system, a glossary, a list of acronyms and abreviations, and a detailed subject index are included.

What does it mean to be starting an academic career in the twenty first century? What challenges and prospects are new academics facing and how are they dealing with these? This book provides answers to these questions through an investigation of the experiences of early career academics in New Zealand universities. Filling a gap in the international literature on the academic profession by providing a comprehensive overview of the experiences of New Zealand academics, the book includes research findings from a national survey covering all eight New Zealand universities. This research is also compared with various findings from the 2007 Changing Academic Profession survey in 19 other countries. The book encourages readers to think about the early career academic experience in New Zealand in relation to their own experiences of the academic profession internationally. Key areas of focus in the nine chapters include: the teaching, research, and service preferences and activities of early career academics; work-life balance; satisfaction; the experiences of Māori academics; and professional development and support for all early career academics. Underpinning the book is the issue of the socialisation of early career academics into the academic profession in the twenty first century, and how structure and agency interact to affect that socialisation. Suggestions are made, and links to freely available online resources are provided, for improving socialisation at the individual, departmental, institutional, and national levels.

This revised and expanded third edition text utilizes a public health framework and the latest epidemiological, treatment, and service systems research to promote a comprehensive understanding of the organization, financing, and delivery of mental health and substance abuse services in the United States. Written by national experts in the field, this timely work will provide policymakers, administrators, clinicians, and public health and behavioral health graduate students with the knowledge base needed to manage and transform mental health service systems, both nationally and locally.The book is unique in providing a public health framework of the most significant issues facing mental health policy makers, administrators, planners, and practitioners. It combines issues (e.g., evaluation; law; ethnicity) that extend across different age groups, treatment settings, and disorders, with issues that are population and disorder specific.The publication of this book is timely for those involved with the debate over national health care reform legislation, and provides important and timely information (on populations at-risk for mental disorders, services, and systems issues) for those responsible for implementing policies and programs resulting from this reform effort.

User involvement is now official policy throughout the health and social care system. Does this mean that user involvement practices are unproblematic? Has it lost its radical edge as it has become an accepted part of service delivery, research and policy making? This important text offers a critical stocktake of the state of user involvement, comprising contributions from both user activists and leading academics. The contributors consider different contexts in which involvement is taking place, both in the groups involved and the activities they are engaged in, and includes different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on issues such as whether we should measure the impact of involvement. This valuable collection will be a crucial resource for students in health and social care and in social work, for researchers developing participative research practice, and for user activists seeking to learn how others have developed distinctive ways of challenging professional perspectives. Book jacket.

This important book is the first to make an explicit link between management practices and service outcomes in social welfare agencies. Managing for Service Effectiveness in Social Welfare Organizations is based on the premise that the primary responsibility and distinctive competency of social welfare management is delivering high quality, effective services to clients. Collectively, the book’s esteemed contributors have clearly presented a model of administration founded on concepts and strategies for connecting managerial action with service effectiveness. The sections of the book correspond to the core functions and tasks in an effective approach to management, including measuring performance, program and organizational design, managing people, managing information, managing environmental relations, and the ethics of managing for effectiveness.

The intention for this book is to present the resistance to change phenomenon from a new perspective. The term resistance is complex and very often misinterpreted. Change leaders should adapt their perspectives on this subject and try to see resistance from a positive angle as well. By just changing the prospect of analyzing it, managers could experience a greater success in implementing new changes and effectively attract more employees onto their side. Instead of trying to eliminate or suppress employees' resistance, managers should rather use their reactions in a positive framework. Resistance may be useful as feedback and therefore, managers can use it to improve and refine the organizational change process.