Support Planning in Practice

Aim: This paper aims to explore how people with ID are supported to make decisions about social care. Method: We draw on a qualitative study of personal budget users in England, which included 20 people with ID. We particularly focused on how people got help with their own support plan, and we obtained some ‘live’ recordings, showing how this happens in practice. We used conversation analysis (CA) to focus on the interactional problem of how to engage a person with ID in decision making, while also talking with their family member. Results: We show how people with ID were given openers to speak, and were supported and prompted by their family members. Support planners and family members did some joint work, to persuade and cajole the person with ID. There were also points of conflict, which had to be resolved. We can think of these issues as problems for practitioners, but these results often look different when considered from other viewpoints. Conclusions: We took some of these recordings to a group of people with ID, who offered their own solutions, and we subsequently made a DVD with them, showing how people can get good support to speak up.