A primary purpose of the intellectual disability system is to assist individuals to achieve personal goals that support greater levels of independence and assist the individual to live an everyday life. These goals are typically selected, with consumer and family input, through an interdisciplinary planning process. Goals ideally should be stated in an objective manner and be measureable. Attainment of these goals is a key element in assessing the benefit accrued by the consumers of ID/A services.
Woods Services employs such an interdisciplinary planning process, and goals and treatment strategies are identified for each consumer. Goal attainment is assessed on a monthly basis via reports to the Care Coordinator. This particular report will summarize goal attainment for 310 individuals whose performances over the previous year were reported by their Care Coordinators via SurveyMonkey questionnaire. It is important to note that this represents a convenience sample of the individuals who live in the Mollie Woods and Woodlands programs, rather than the entire population of those two programs.
Number of Goals
Across the 310 consumers, 771 goals were identified by their interdisciplinary teams. This suggests that the typical Woods resident has 2.5 treatment goals. 82 individuals had four goals. It should be noted that this accounting does not include any goals listed in an Individual Education Plan (IEP) or any specific day program goals.
These data suggest that the number of goals identified by treatment teams has declined somewhat over the past year. In both the 2018 and 2019 data collections, respondents reported that the typical Woods residential consumer had 3.9 treatment goals. It must be noted that earlier analyses included goal attainment reports for all residents in the Mollie Woods and Woodlands programs, while this report is based on only those individuals for whom data were submitted. It is conceivable that sampling (i.e., who contributed data) is at least partially responsible for these results. A significant reaction is not warranted from these data.
Types of Goals
Goal statements were submitted to content analysis in an effort to identify common themes. This process resulted in five goal categories: reduction of social devalued behaviors, increasing skills in activities of daily living, other goals involving the learning of new skills, goals that simply required an individual to perform an already learned skill, and goals that were almost entirely under control of staff. A breakdown of these goal types by percentage appears below:
- 6% Behavior Reduction
- 1% Increase ADL skills
- 9% Perform already learned skill (“Just do it”)
- 9% Staff goals
- 4% Learning a new skill in other than ADL area
Subjectively, it appears that there is less reliance on staff goals and “just do it” goals than in previous years. This should be viewed positively.
Goal Attainment
There were 736 individual goals that included progress statements. In some cases, no progress statement was included because the goal was too new to be expected to show progress. Improvement was noted in 72.3% of all listed goals, while no change was noted in 21.7% of goals. Deterioration was noted on 6.0% of goals. In 2018, progress was reported on 56.8% of goals, while progress was reported on 63.8% of goals in 2019. While this is a positive trend, the potential impact of sampling cannot be totally discounted.
Limiting the analysis to just behavior change goals, it was determined that progress was noted on 61.5% of behavior change goals. For the ADL goals, progress was noted in 76.2% of the identified goals. It should be noted that these progress estimates are, on the average, mid-year estimates. They were collected in mid-fall 2021, and they may have started anytime during the 12 preceding months. Thus, on the average, they are ½ year estimates.
