Personal Assistance Services: A Vital Workplace Support

This manuscript reports findings from focus groups and survey research related to experiences and issues related to the use of personal assistance for persons with disabilities in work settings. These findings underscore the need for consumer control and self-advocacy in planning and arranging workplace personal assistance. Great disability rights leaders and self advocates like Ed Roberts and Judy Huemann, have proven the value of customer-directed Personal Assistant Services (PAS) through their work in the independent living movements and at the World Institute On Disability (WID). These two pioneers demonstrated the value and cost effectiveness of customer-directed PAS in enabling people with significant disabilities to live in the community. Their work was documented in the research monograph "Attending To America " (Litvak, Zukas, & Huemann 1987). This document has become a blue print for establishing customer-directed PAS model systems being developed in a number of states. These model systems are enabling countless of thousands of individuals with significant disabilities to live and work in the community. PAS is broadly defined by Nosek (1991) as "assistance from another person with activities of daily living to compensate for a functional limitation " (p. 2). Activities of daily living (ADLs) include such activities as persona