The Working Alliance, consisting of building bonds, establishing goals, and developing tasks, has been deemed the cornerstone of helping professions, and has been found to significantly and reliably predict client outcomes. The importance of client characteristics and perceptions of working alliance has been established in the literature. Less is…

The provision of consistent high quality home- and community-based services to children with disabilities living in rural and frontier areas is a challenge. Distance, weather, geographic terrain (mountains, canyons), and shortages of pediatric early interventionists are among the challenges to ensuring appropriate and equitable services.…

This paper documents the experiences of a group of parents who came together to form a human service cooperative in their local community to address the needs of their adult children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Each parent felt that their child's needs were not (or could not be) met by existing providers. Parent leaders who…

Human service organizations are intended to stabilize low-income families and promote self-sufficiency by providing much needed services and benefits. Recipients, however, often do not get everything they need in terms of either benefits or service quality. Understandably, clients want the help they are entitled to and promised from providers who…

An attempt was made to determine predictors of service need, use, and outcome among chronically impaired adults and aged who were living in the community and using the home-based, long term care services of the Chronic Illness Center (CIC) of the Cuyahoga County Hospitals (Ohio). Randomly selected consumer service records (N=200) were coded for…

This paper, developed by a group of parents, advocates, and service providers, addresses the limitations of human services for people with developmental disabilities, including: (1) services cannot "fix" people or problems; (2) consistency and uniformity are not necessarily good qualities of human services; (3) more human services are not…

We evaluated an outcome management program for working with staff to improve the performance of adults with severe disabilities in a congregate day-treatment setting. Initially, observations were conducted of student task involvement and staff distribution of teaching interactions across students in four program sites. Using recent normative data…

This report presents an assessment of Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) services delivery to American Samoans residing in California, Hawaii, and American Samoa. The evaluation includes analyses of human services needs, resources, and delivery. The effectiveness of human services delivery was assessed using interviews with Samoan…

There is general agreement that human services (i.e., services that depend on direct interpersonal contact between a deliverer and a client) are difficult to evaluate. The author points out some sources of this difficulty and proposes a strategy for the evaluation of human services delivery. (Author/GDC)

The fundamental question for those concerned with high quality services for people with severe disabilities is how resources can best be used to assist these individuals to live better lives. The question of how to assist in creation of better lives tests and builds leadership. Leadership involves mobilizing people's resources to make progress on…

This article examines factors influencing the provision of high-quality services to individuals who are deaf-blind. Various definitions of this population and the unique challenges in serving them are addressed, as are transitional services, gaps in services, the importance of interagency collaboration, and components of a successful service…

The General Accounting Office (GAO) was asked to determine who is being served by the Food Stamp Employment and Training Program (FSE&T program), what services are being provided through the program, and what is known about the program's outcomes and effectiveness. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does not collect nationwide data on…

The consumer of a service is of primary importance when defining groups most concerned with program impact. Program effectiveness for the consumer may be increased through the use of certain guiding principles based on the extension of existing quality assurance and program evaluation methodologies. (Author/RL)

Presents a nonbureaucratic model of mental health service delivery: the Family Life Center in Columbia, Maryland. Describes services through three programs: a counseling service, community services, and an information and referral service. Professional volunteers work with clients referred by counseling coordinators. Discusses implications for…

This paper presents information to assist in the planning and development of policy related to the education of very young children with disabilities. The paper first considers research-supported reasons for providing early childhood intervention services based on effectiveness data from many sources. Subsequent sections examine: (1)…