Hand-Writing

I work with the Total Life Project, a cutting edge research project where 3 adults with disabilities live in a house (355 S. College). My title is a Life Coach, and I will be responsible for helping these students to learn to live on their own. Please do not mistake this project with a group home, as residents of group homes will always need to live with other people and often require outside assistance. Our goal is for our students to live on their own after they leave the Total Life dorm. Because this is a new project, we do not have any students living in the house, but we have several applications, and the paperwork required before move in is crazy! When these students come, we will be using a Person-Center approach to develop Personal Plans for them. It has taken a great deal of money and time to train the Life Coaches and other members of the team to learn to create these plans, but there is still a problem.

You guessed it... technology. When we were first introduced to the technique, everything was on paper. I mean binders of information on each student, hand written. Their every action and response needs to be documented if research is to be cutting-edge, but is it truly cutting-edge if all the documentation is hand-written? The Total Life team believed that it would be more valuable to spend a few extra minutes to type the information than it would be to leave a legacy of hand-written information. This was not the opinion of all of the staff, and many well-respected professionals felt that computerized information was not suitable for the social services field.

Since when is the social services field required to obtain callouses and blisters from writing all of their information? At a recent training with the man who created the Person-Centered approach, the team addressed the issue. The trainer replied that he encourages an electronic data set, but the reality is that most service providers do not have enough computers for to allow for a project to be completely computerized, so he teaches the hand-written approach.

I wonder if the goal of completely electronic record-keeping for social service agencies will ever be met? Will an electronic approach to teaching Person-Centered Planning ever become standard? Certainly not in the near future.