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Essential Lifestyle Planning

Essential Lifestyle Planning is a guided process for learning how someone wants to live and for developing a plan to help make it happen.

Essential Lifestyle plans are developed through a process of asking and listening. Developing plans that really reflect how people want to live requires:

• The perspective of those who know and care about the person;

• Their stories about good days and bad; and

• What they like and admire about the person.

Good plans reflect the perceptions of the focus person and those who know and care about him or her. The plans include what things are important to and for the person in everyday life; issues of health and safety; and what it takes to support the person.

In Essential Lifestyle Planning, the person, family and those who care about him or her are at the centre of the team, not the program or the professional. This is Semiahmoo House Society’s way of Person Centred Planning.

What is the Essential Lifestyle Planning process?

It starts with the person and his or her family describing how the person wants to live; and identifying the people that know and care about him or her. Next, the person who is writing the plan meets with the individual and those invited to attend. Finally, the person writing the plan works with the individual and his or her family to make sure that the plan makes sense.

The Essential Lifestyle Plan is the driving force of all programs and services offered at Semiahmoo House Society.

Please visit www.elpnet.net to learn more about Essential Lifestyle Planning.