HCBS Training

On your journey to becoming a more person-centered organization, you have:

• Formed a team,
• Considered how ready your organization is to begin implementing new practices, 
• Evaluated what practices and strengths your organization already has in place, 
• Created a vision for what services will look like in the future,
• Developed outcome statements and an action plan based on the team’s vision and values, and
• Reviewed your organization’s performance-based staff development processes.

Now that your team has a vision and plan, it is important to ask the following questions:

• How do you know if what you are doing is improving lives for people?  
• Are new practices being implemented with fidelity?  
• How will your team decide where to focus person-centered efforts over time? 
• Are parts of the organization doing really well while other areas need more support?

In most organizations, how well person-centered practices are used varies from day to day. In large organizations, there may be examples where person-centered practices work well and other examples where improvement is needed. This makes evaluation a challenge. If you see a person receiving HCBS one day, you may think that you understand how well the organization provides services for all people.

Evaluating HCBS based on a short visit can be misleading.  Instead, it is important to look for patterns across HCBS.  A strong evaluation plan can help teams understand whether service quality and peoples’ lives are improving. This module does not provide a comprehensive review of evaluation. Instead, it is meant to fit within the evaluation plan already occurring within HCBS.  For more details about evaluation, please visit the Module 7 Resource page .