Handy skills - partnership working in practice

Background: Disabled Adults' Resource Team (DART) was established in 1999 to meet the ongoing health and therapy needs of adults of working age who have an ongoing physical impairment. DART works to a person centred social model, on goal focused episodes of intervention taking into account each service user's individual circumstances. DART therapists work together in an interdisciplinary manner to enable service users to achieve their goals. Content: This article details how partnership working between a service user with cerebral palsy and his therapists has enabled him to gain the use of his right arm. It identifies the range of treatment modalities that were used and explores how important it is for therapy to remain functionally relevant to the individual. Conclusions: By interspersing the service user's own report of the experience of therapy with the therapists' perspective, a person centred approach is demonstrated.