A Program Within An Organization That Influence The Lives Of People With Disabilities: Case Study

1 Description of a program within an organisation that influence the lives of people with disabilities

Type of activity of the program/organisation

Ability West / Éirim an Iarthair is a social care organisation, which offers supportive and social care services to the people with intellectual disability. The organisation was founded in 1962 and it was known as The Galway County Association in the former days, offering services for mentally handicapped children (Abilitywest.ie, 2016). Currently, the organisation has enhanced their services from children to adult care users and nowadays the organisation is providing their excellent supportive services to 530 people, with intellectual disabilities. The organisation works in supporting children
The organisational mission is to analyze and fulfil the needs of intellectual disabled service users. The organisational mission is to consider and prioritize the fundamental rights of the service users, through the promotional activities and supportive care facilities. It also aims to empower the consumers or the service users for living their normal life (Loo et al. 2011). The organisation is fulfilling its mission as well as playing an unique role as an NGO, by not only helping the disabled people to recover their health issues, rather by assisting them to be established in the society in a meaningful way and to improve their quality of life through different programs. Therefore, the organisation has to focus more on its uniqueness of services and empowering the care users to be social (Miller and Rollnick 2012). Therefore, the program will address the needs of specific group of people with intellectual disability and evaluate the efficiency of the services provided by the organisation to deal with the disability issues of the organisation (Luxford 2010). According to the view point of the senior manager of the organisation, Ability West is not only a type of care, rather it is the way to better life. The aim of the organisational program is to develop a supportive community in the care settings, where the lifestyle of the intellectually disabled people would be improved by meeting their individual needs. McCance et al. (2011) argued that, the mission of the organisation “Ability West” is not only to help service-users with intellectual disability, rather the purpose of the programs is to undertake different supportive activities for providing beneficial “person-centered support” to address the needs of wide range of people. More than 200 volunteers are working together for addressing the disability and other needs of service users.