Phil Garner
Last week, personal care worker Helen Hanson interviewed Phil Garner via email about his experience with the DCA’s Personal Care & Support Credential examination. Garner is executive director of Buffalo River Services, an agency that provides services to people with disabilities and their families in Waynesboro, Tennessee. Buffalo River recently administered the credential exam to a select group of direct support professionals.
Why is it so important to have quality caregivers?
As we have worked over the past few years in Tennessee’s Person Centered Organization project, we found one very important barrier to providing great services: There is a gap between what we are teaching our direct support professionals and our expectation that they should perform their duties in the most effective person-centered way. We realized we were far from where we needed to be just to achieve our current goals, let alone the “best practices” we aim for, which include person-centered thinking. Continue reading »
A full set of 
