Promoting Resilience, Independence and Self-Management in Intellectual Disability Services

The concept of consumer empowerment to ensure health care and treatment is appropriate to meet their needs, is widely embraced. Most progressive caring services implement processes to enable consumers and their families to participate in all aspects of care planning, delivery and evaluation. This paper provides a framework to promote resilience and independence of people in intellectual disability service settings and describes processes providers can introduce to encourage people with intellectual disability to manage their own care and treatment. Implementing PRISM (Promoting Resilience, Independence and Self-Management) is facilitated by use of specific tools, protocols and methods to ensure people with intellectual disability are able to take change of their own care and treatment.