Redressing power imbalances in care for people with intellectual disabilities

In the Netherlands, client and family participation in care for people with intellectual disabilities has been in vogue for a long time, and increasingly receives attention (KPMG and Vilans 2017). However, the perspective and experiential knowledge of service users and relatives is often still insuBiciently used for the co-creation of care. The professional perspective is often still dominant. In addition, professionals mainly focus on clients and less on relatives, even though relatives often play an important role in the client’s (quality of) life (Wiersma 2017). The project ‘Inclusive Collaboration in Disability Care’[1] (ICDC) focusses on enhancing equal communication between people with intellectual disabilities, their relatives, and professional caregivers, and hence contributes to redressing power imbalances in long term care. It investigates the question: “How can the triangle of client, relative and professional caregiver together co-create better care and support?”.