Family-centred, person-centred: a guide for everyday practice and organisational change

This guide aims to support people who work with children, adolescents and young adults with a disability or developmental delay to work in more family-centred ways. It is for educators, respite workers, allied health practitioners, early childhood intervention professionals, case managers and the myriad other professionals involved in the lives of children and young people and their families. Family-centred approaches will already inform the work of many readers in different ways. This guide seeks to strike a balance between orienting less experienced professionals to the approach and supporting their more experienced colleagues to reflect on and improve this aspect of their work. A fundamental premise of the guide is that there is always more that any professional can do to strengthen and deepen their family-centred practice. This is backed up by research demonstrating that a gap can arise between how family-centred professionals think their practice is and the experience of those they work with; and that even professionals dedicated to family-centred practices can find them difficult to sustain fully over time. Leading family-centred practice researcher Carl Dunst, drawing on feedback from service users over many years, suggests that many professionals excel in what he calls the 'relational' elements of family-centred practice but find it challenging to maintain its 'participatory' elements - those that support family choice and participation, and potentially impact on the nature of services themselves.