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Joan MacDonald

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Joan MacDonald suffered a stroke in October, 2004. Since her daughter, Lynn, is a social worker, she was knowledgeable about the Consumer Directed Community Supports program in Minnesota as an alternative to the traditional option. Joan had been a house wife and spent most of her time at home taking care of her family. By partaking in the traditional services, she would have to enter a day care program that would keep away from the comforts of her home and family. Given Joan’s condition, it was necessary for Joan’s husband to take an early retirement to become a personal assistant, but without income from his job, he was unsure how to manage this new obligation. Through Consumer Directed Community Supports, he was able to be hired as her care provider and Joan was able to stay at home. As Lynn put it “he felt he was most qualified to take care of her. He knows how to care for her diabetes, and how to communicate with her. If she makes a noise, he knows how to respond.”

Lynn works as her mother’s Flexible Case Manager and helps her dad throughout this process. Together they have been relentless about Joan’s occupational and speech therapies. With traditional therapy programs, often times a consumer is terminated after they have reached a maintenance level of skill recovery. Through the Consumer Directed Community Supports model, Joan’s family helped her to continue developing skills. She is now able to open the refrigerator to get ice and make herself a ham and cheese sandwich on her own! Many of the workers hired to help Joan are friends or acquaintances from community programs with which she is involved. The entire family became invested and involved in Joan’s rehabilitation. They knew what activities Joan enjoyed before her stroke, like playing Yahtzee, and they are able to include these in her daily tasks. The flexibility of Consumer Directed Community Supports has helped Joan and her family arrange her personal care services to meet her needs and interests.