During my master's studies, I was an intern at the Centre for Social Work in the Northern Primorska Region at the Nova Gorica unit, where I was mentored by the coordinator of disability care. During my internship, I worked with users of personal assistance, which was a new and unexplored area for me. Personal assistance is a new service, which is why I was interested to know how this practice is implemented, how it benefits the users, what needs the users have, and how they find out about personal assistance in the first place. Therefore, I decided to research the users' experiences of personal assistance.
The research consisted of interviews with eight personal assistance users from the Northern Primorska Region with physical, mental, and intellectual disabilities, as well as with visual impairments. I prearranged a meeting with them, visited them at home and finally, conducted an interview.
I explored the changes that personal assistance brings to the users' lives, the services they use, their attitudes towards personal assistance, the differences in personal assistance between the different groups of the users, and how the users are informed about personal assistance.
In the qualitative research, I collected data by asking questions and learning about the users' life stories. I found that personal assistance makes big difference to the users' lives, e.g., it increases the quality of their lives, the users get the opportunity to make their own decisions about their lives, it enables them to live outside institutions, and it improves relationships with their relatives. I have found that their needs are met by using various services, the most common being personal assistance services and services to help with the household and other daily tasks. Users have a good opinion of personal assistance and find it useful. People with physical disabilities need the most help with tasks involving physical activity, while other groups need mainly encouragement, support, and guidance. I have found that users do not receive enough information about personal assistance during the help-seeking period, but once they become users they know where to find information.
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