The Impact of Support Intensity Needs on Person-Centred Case Management

The Impact of Support Intensity Needs on Person-Centred Case Management

The study analyzed the predictors of Quality of Life in terms of support provided to persons with Intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Despite the current calls for integrated social and health systems to provide more and better care at a lower cost, calls made more pressing by tested public finances, little is known about how service centres for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities use resources to address individual support needs. Using data from a large national study conducted on over 1,000 Italian service centre clients, we investigated the impact of individual support needs and socio-ecological factors on resource use in individualized support planning. The results suggested that a person-centred approach did not discriminate on gender or level of intellectual functioning, while individuals with high intensity of support needs received relatively few supports. We also found that a flexible parametric approach to model jointly supports to community participation, adaptive skills training, and professional care to enable functioning provides an appropriate description of individual resource utilization, and therefore its adoption in modelling resource use in complex care is recommended. Implications for service operators considering a support needs model for equitable allocation of resources in personalized planning are discussed. This research resulted in an article.