Area Board Locations

QUALITY ASSESSMENT PROJECT

In 1998 the Area Boards on Developmental Disabilities entered into an Interagency Agreement with the Department of Developmental Services to conduct Life Quality Assessments (LQA) for persons with developmental disabilities who receive services from regional centers.

During the ensuing 12 years, Area Board staff and visitors conducted more than 17,000 surveys annually of people who lived in a variety of residential settings: community care facilities, skilled nursing homes, independent living and foster family homes among them.

These visits gleaned a rich body of information about the lives, choices, preferences, hopes and dreams of people with developmental disabilities. The LQA surveys provided insights to aid the development of consumer service plans and provided systemic information about service needs regionally and statewide.

In 2009 the DDS decided to embark on a new quality assurance process, one that would enable the state to evaluate itself against other states and to evaluate the delivery of services by regional center. After releasing a Request for Proposals (RFP), DDS entered into a contract with the Human Services Research Institute (HSRI) to implement HSRI's National Core Indicators (NCI) survey tool. The State Council on Developmental Disabilities, along with its Area Board offices, extended its Quality Assurance Interagency Agreement to now encompass the implementation of this new survey.

Beginning on or around May 1, 2010, Area Board staff and interviewers will begin conducting interviews with the new NCI survey tool. Our agreement with DDS calls for us to interview 400 adult consumers of each regional center by the end of 2010. Unlike with the LQA project, we will now be interviewing only adults but including adults who reside with their families as well as those who do not. The survey tool itself is quite different from the LQA model. Instead of gathering consumer-specific information that is then put into a consumer report, we will be collecting data in the aggregate. All information gathered from consumer interviews will be kept confidential. At the end of the year, HSRI will begin analyzing the data gathered and in 2011 will issue a statewide and regional center-specific report.

For an overview of HSRI's national data findings and additional information, see the DDS Quality Assurance web page: http://www.dds.ca.gov/QA/index.cfm