The Percy Hedley Foundation

Statement of our Strategic Principles

We are an organisation devoted to improving the lives of people with disabilities and their families. We recognise a socio-medical model of disability that accepts that impairments often have an organic or medical cause, but the impact of that will be determined by society attitudes and responses. We can improve lives by considering both these elements.

We provide services which must be of a high standard and meet all statutory requirements. But we go beyond just meeting those standards. We want to discover new and better ways of supporting people with disabilities. We will use innovative, even pioneering approaches when we believe these might be of value. Where necessary, we will seek additional funding to enable us to provide an enhanced service.

We feel a responsibility to establish best practice, not only through trying out innovative approaches, but through researching their impact. We are not satisfied with achieving improvements by simply reflecting on our work; nor are we dedicated to identifying new approaches simply through commissioning others to carry out research into current practice. We will actively seek new knowledge through rigorously evaluating and researching what we do.

We feel a responsibility to support disabled people and their families beyond those who directly receive our services. We achieve this through the systematic and widespread dissemination of our knowledge and promotion of best practice. This may involve strategic alliances with other organisations who may be more involved in campaigning and in confrontation to change entitlements.

Therefore, our practice will be innovative; our experiences used to create new knowledge and understanding; this will then be disseminated to influence practice more widely. Always assuming high quality in what we do, we will judge our work against these 3 criteria; innovation, evaluation, dissemination.

January 2009