SA Group Enterprises regularly submits its Business Services for PASSING evaluations as part of its commitment to opening itself to external scrutiny to improve its services to the people with a disability, as well as enabling an invaluable training opportunity to workshop participants.

Inprint Design scored extremely well in this evaluation. Overall, it rated in the upper range of scores for all services evaluated world-wide utilising PASSING evaluations.

PASSING Evaluation of Inprint Design 18th & 19th July 2007

A team conducted an evaluation of Inprint Design on the 18th and 19th July 2007, as part of a training evaluation workshop conducted by Training & Evaluation for Change (TEC) in South Australia. The purpose of the workshop is to teach participants, who typically work in either the disability or aged care sectors, to conduct a service evaluation, and particularly to ascertain the extent to which the service evaluated meets the criteria of Social Role Valorisation (SRV). SRV is a social theory which has been very influential in the development of services and supports to people who are intellectually or physically disabled, mentally ill or elderly in many parts of the world over the past 30 years.

The evaluation instrument used was the 3rd(revised 2007) Edition of PASSING , a manual which was first developed in 1983, by Dr Wolf Wolfensberger and has been used world-wide since, in many thousands of service evaluations.

SA Group Enterprises regularly submits its Business Services for PASSING evaluations as part of its commitment to opening itself to external scrutiny to improve its services to the people with disabilities whom it serves, as well as enabling an invaluable training opportunity to workshop participants.

Inprint Design scored extremely well in this evaluation. Overall, it rated in the upper range of scores for all services evaluated world-wide utilising PASSING evaluations , as reviewed by Flynn(1999).

In particular the service scored well in terms of its relevance to the life experiences and needs of the people, the ‘fit’ between the job and each person, the individualisation of the work, the amount and relevance of support from staff. Also impressive was the level of personal growth and challenge for employees, the amount of enjoyability and interest, and their ability to exercise control or influence on work performed. There was also a lot of attention to the images projected on employees by Inprint in areas such as the location of the setting (it is an authentic workplace), the layout of the workplace, the fact that support staff are employed for their skills as graphic and web designers, promotion and publishing rather than as human service ‘minders’.

There was evidence of thoughtfulness and ‘coherency’ in the sense of Inprint paying a lot of attention to ensuring that there was a good match between/among the work performed, the worker identity, the setting (internal and external) and the needs of each person served. There was a clear differentiation of each person’s goals and supports, an appreciation of each person’s whole life, an avoidance of the ritualistic programming which seems to pervade many workplaces for people with disabilities, and open-minded expectations.

Following the evaluation feedback we have had discussions with the CEO and key staff at Inprint Design with a view to conducting an exercise in mid-2008 to tease out some of the key areas of service design which may require further work. This may involve bringing potential team members from other parts of Australia and perhaps New Zealand to further analyse the service model and hopefully refine it. The event will also involve key personnel from Inprint Design as part of the exercise.

Meantime we have asked Inprint Design if we might work with them to develop a set of teaching slides for use in our other workshops to illustrate the many elements of good practice which we encountered in this evaluation. Hopefully, through this exercise there will be an opportunity to influence developments in other parts of Australasia.

Our sincere thanks to Robert, Maree and Lee-Anne for the ongoing opportunities to follow and learn from developments at Inprint Design and in other areas of SA Group Enterprises’ operations.

Peter Millier
MA(Hons) DipClinPsych
TEC Senior Trainer
5TH February 2008

Bibliography
Flynn, R.J. (1999). A comprehensive review of PASS and PASSING research. In R.J. Flynn & R.A. Lemay (Eds). A quarter-century of Normalization and Social Role Valorization: Evolution and Impact. University of Ottawa Press

Wolfensberger, W., & Thomas, S. (2007). PASSING. A tool for analysing service quality according to Social Role Valorization criteria. Ratings manual (3rd rev. ed.) Syracuse, NY: Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership & Change Agentry (Syracuse University)