Personalising Support through Communication between People with Intellectual Disabilities and their Support Workers

Support organised through a personal budget aims to promote people’s choices in how they arrange their support. Participation in choices of people who use little or no verbal speech to express themselves requires that support workers use personalised communication. This article explores how support workers use personalised communication to prioritise the choices of people with intellectual disabilities about organising support through a personal budget. It applies Gormley and Fager’s framework of dimensions for personalising communication to analyse ethnographic data from four people with intellectual disabilities using personal budgets and their support workers. The analysis found that workers promoted people’s participation in choices about their support when they focused on how people preferred to express themselves. Support practice, policy and research that target people’s communication preferences in making support arrangements can have direct impact on their satisfaction with the arrangements and the quality of their personalised support.