Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About DDA, but Were Afraid to Ask
Webinar date: September 21, 2016
Transcript:Karasch & Associates
"This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings."
A note from the DD Council and The Arc: In the middle of the webinar we lost internet connection. Conversation related to problem- solving the technological issue has been removed from the transcript.
> Hello everybody. Thank you for waiting. On behalf of the Maryland Developmental Disabilities Council and our partner The Arc Maryland, welcome to Building the Future, Now!, a series of webinars designed to provide you with the tools, information, and ideas needed to improve quality of life and effect change. This summer we surveyed Marylanders to find out what topics were of most interest for a fall webinar series. “All about the DDA” was a clear first choice. And so, we’ve put together a series of 3 webinars beginning with today’s presentation: All You Ever Wanted to Know about DDA, But Were Afraid to Ask, providing a general overview of the who, what, how, and where’s of DDA funded services and supports, to include eligibility determination and the waiting list. Part 2, So, You’re Approved for DDA Services – What’s Next? is scheduled for October 20th -- followed by Part 3 scheduled for November 10th , Employment First: New Opportunities, Dispelling Myths & Misconceptions.
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We are fortunate to have three accomplished professionals with us today.
Patricia Sastoque is the Deputy Director for Programs at the Developmental Disabilities Administration (DDA), responsible for management and oversight of all program supports. After starting her career as a direct support professional, she has held various positions in Louisiana, the District of Columbia, and Maryland. Mrs. Sastoque’s experience includes Person-Centered and Personal Outcomes; quality enhancement; community based residential services; and transition from institutions to community based services. Mrs. Sastoque, “…looks forward to applying her varied experience as DDA transforms to a more person-centered service delivery system that integrates best practices, resulting in people with developmental disabilities living fully integrated and meaningful lives.”
An advocate for disability rights, CristyMarchand currently serves as Executive Director of The Arc Maryland, the largest statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to the rights and quality of life of children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. After serving as Executive Director of The Arc Maryland for over 20 years she moved to New Mexico as Executive Director of Family Voices, a national family-led organization with local affiliates dedicated to health care of children and youth with special health care needs. She recently returned to Maryland. Cristy has over 30 years’ experience in positions of leadership at the public and private levels in public policy and disability rights advocacy, association management, and program development in the field of developmental disabilities. Cristy is “…driven and inspired by the courage of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families and believe this is what makes systems change happen.”
Joyce Sims has been the Executive Director for Resource Connections Inc. since 2010, having served as Program Director for the prior 4 years. With over 30 years in human services, she has performed in various capacities starting out in direct support then moving to program management and quality assurance in provider services, before moving to Coordination of Community Services. Joyce “… always tries to put herself in the position of the family members she works with—she is committed to doing whatever she can to promote the same service delivery she would want for her own family.”
My name is Kelley Malone and I serve as director of communications with the Council -- it's my pleasure to be a part of this webinar today. Let's briefly review our agenda today so you know what to expect. We will begin with Patricia Sastoque who will provide an overview of the developmental disabilities administration and Joyce Sims will be talking about the essentials and CristyMarchand will be talking about eligibility. And then we will have time for questions and answers. Okay and, I will turn the microphone over to Patricia Sastoque.
> Kelley, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. I think we have lots of good information from everyone. Hopefully by the time you finish all of the three webinars, people can get a really good overview of the developmental disabilities administration. As you all know, this is not just a one direction, but it's a collaboration between families, advocates, individuals and services in our community. So hopefully, I am able to give you a good overview of who we are, what we do and the next step. So what you see in front on your screen is just an overview so that you can see that -- how we are organized. And you can see that we are actually under the governor's office and we are under the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the developmental administration, so you can see where we stand in the spectrum of the big picture across the state. Our next slide has information about our goals, our mission and our vision. And I think that this is really important for folks to be able to see, so that we know that our major goal is to make sure that all Marylanders lead personally fulfilling lives. We got this information from what you said you wanted and what we feel we need to be doing for Marylanders for those with disabilities. We want to provide programmatic leadership in the design and development of services to afford people with developmental disabilities and their families with a system that is responsive to the person's needs and person outcomes. We need to make this system a place that you feel that you can go to and get very clear information about what we are doing to make it user friendly and not make it very complicated for you to navigate our system. Our vision is to have people with developmental disabilities, be able to direct their own lives, have available support options and have the opportunity to make decisions. That is really very important. An overall on the next slide, you'll see is an overview of the vision, so we are seeing that people will have full lives in the community of their choice, where they live, where they participate, and so that they are active citizens in the community. If you look at this design here it really talks about the core, the core is the person centered with thinking and with that we involve the advocates, family support, we also talk about self-direction, our community, employment, housing, funding, road regulation, and support services. So that is the whole reason that we are trying to do this. We are not a catch all. We are not just the one. We want folks to come to DDA and also use other resources around the community that you live in. My next slide kind of talks a little about our core believes and our guiding principles, we are really focusing on doing a whole trajectory of life and what we are trying to do is look at people, not just when they come to DDA of the school system but how do we work with families and individuals with disabilities through the life span. So we believe -- we have a core belief that people with their families have the right to live, love, play, work and pursue their aspirations just like any other person in the community. What you can see here is the life span from child birth until elderly and we are looking at how do we support people to have positive life trajectories and avoid the negative life events that happen, lack of support, lack of services, not being understood, not being able to get to the proper support and if that happened, how do we work together to build a system and how do we not only transform DDA but who needs to be at the table to get us to where we want to be? The next slide I have to click a couple of times so I can show you the five focus areas of community living. Maryland, as you all know is an Employment First state. So we really want to promote employment. And we know it's not the only thing. We want employment to be the first choice. A lot of folks say my son or daughter will never be employed -- There are other options. What is a meaningful day? What does that look like? With supported employment—we will have people in real wage and real jobs focused on strengths and can work in a competitive way. That is one of the focus areas and the other area is supported living. People have choices about where and who they live with, it provides the person the opportunity to use their skills, learn new skills to live more independently and participate in the community, people take command of their life, and have a center role position where they live and with they live with. We are looking to expand our current services to be able to meet the needs of this personal outcome that people want for their lives. Another core focus area is self-determination. For self-determination, it's where people plan their own lives and make their own decisions and determine how resources are used for their support, use their own support and take responsibility for decisions. And the way that we are doing this, is trying to build and change our system so it's responsive to the people in the system that are getting and receiving services. Another employment area is self-advocacy. People use strength and skills to advocate their needs, rights in the community and communicate with the rights. We have self-advocacy support across all of the state and in each regional office there is a person that can go from peer to peer to be able to provide advocacy support and help with self-determination as well. And then one that we saw that was really important, that DDA has not had in previous years, is supporting families. Really look at the core, the family nucleus, supporting families with all of their complexity and diversity. You know, we all have families and idiosyncrasies, we want to make sure we can maximize our strength, capacity, unique ability so we can support the love and care and interdependence so we keep the family nucleus intact and help the family choose well when “I can't get this service so I have to do this.” So how can we ensure that folks are being listened to and we are working with families and individuals receiving services? And speaking of services, to my next slide, a little bit about what we do and what we fund. So when people say what are DDA services – this is a misnomer -- we don't really provide services. We are a funded mechanism. We contract out with providers to be able to provide the services. What does that look like? Coordination of community services--what you know as our case management system, and they are supposed to help and navigate folks through the system, according to services and according to existing communities and DDA services and natural supports. We also have supported employment and that is the focus of people getting real jobs in the community and then we have the habilitated services, habilitation where folks are going in and learning skills, we want them to do meaningful activities rather than doing nothing for six hours a day. We want people to start thinking about, what is a meaning day? What is important for that person that really focuses on the skillset and the strengths and abilities that the person has? How can you make day to day be as meaningful and important as possible? Then we have the employment discovery and customization, this is unique, and carving out and exploring what would work for that person, and also the community learning services, that is exploring the community, of the person's choice, where you can learn about social events, you can learn about employment, you can talk about this really helps a lot with self-esteem, being a member of your community, a participant member of the community, so this area is focused on community integration. And the other section that I am going to talk about is residential services. We have residential Habilitation, personal support, shared living and live in care rent. Some of the shared living and live in care rent gets very little utilization in Maryland. Most people are getting personal support and residential Habilitation and most live in a group home living center and others are getting assisted living services. While we have this, we are not in the process of creating more options for people. We are trying to do some transformation for those services. Right now this is what we offer. And then we are looking at family support services. Individual support services, and care services. These are options for individuals that are using state funding at the present time. On your right-hand side, we have assistive technology, environmental assessments and modifications, transition services, transportation services and vehicle modification. So some of these are very clear, with the exception of the transition services. I think everybody knows what assistive technology is and environmental assessment. Transition services are a little unique. They're a service that provides funds for people either in institutions or nursing homes and the goal is to transition the folks out of the funding and there is funding available to help those individuals out. And then the self-direction option, that once the person is in the waiver, you have the option to participate in self-direction. And then we have the advocacy support specialists and we have the support available across the state. The other piece we have is behavior support across the state through contract and then we have something that I didn't put on the slide but I thought families would be interested in knowing, we have LISS, low intensive support services, that is $2,000 available, there is a random selection of funding that the DDA offers for families and right now we are in the second round, it opened up on August1st. It stays open until November the 30th and will be collect selected on November the 15th and we will be able to notify everybody in January. And this gives you an array of services. So you ask, how is the DDA structured? I will not bore you with this, but on the slide, you can see that on the left side, we have physical and operations and on the right-hand side we have programs. And we all report to the deputy secretary, Bernie Simon and everything on the right-hand side has to do with program, the waiver, clinical services, the behavior support, nursing and the quality enhancement. So the right-hand side is all of the program piece and all the left-hand side is the physical, operations, appeals, litigation, rules. I am operating all of the things on your right-hand side of your screen. And then what you are really want to know is the next slide. The next slide kind of tells you all right Patricia, I am having issues and don't know about DDA. How is it structured? Where do I need to go? We wanted to restructure the offices to be similar to the headquarters so we created what we call individual units under self-advocacy support, professional development, federal programs, provider relations, quality enhancement, individual family support and clinical support, those services -- those units support the services that I just described and defined. We have advocates in all of the regions. We have professional development, that means we have trainers that help with professional development, webinar and not only for professional development for the DDA employees but the community at large. The federal programs are everything that we're going to talk about on the home and community based waiver. We really provide services that are funded by Medicaid and CristyMarchand and Joyce will talk to you a lot about the eligibility and the process, at this point everybody we serves gets home and community-based services. Then we have provider relations and community enhancement. Those are two new units we have developed to really be responsive and provide support and technical aspects to the providers. And then again we talk about individual and family supports, that is a whole focus area. Who do you have to contact? If you live in the southern region, you contact Judy, on the screen you have the phone number, she can help you navigate anything you need if you live in the area. For central, you have Haywood Evans and for eastern shore you have Kim and you have her information and phone number and on the western region you have Kathy Marshall. I put this in here because I think it's important for you to have a name and a contact so you can go directly to the top person and they can tell you who you need to talk to. Our goal is to be customer friendly and able to listen to your needs and able to help you navigate the system so I think the overall goal on the next slide says we can accomplish the vision and mission so the person with intellectual and developmental disabilities can have full lives in the communities of their choice where they are included, participate and are active citizens. This is an overview and now CristyMarchand is going to go over and tell you a little more in depth about eligibility.