The Individualized Family Service Plan

What Is The IFSP?

The Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) is an ongoing process of the whole team discovering appropriate goals and strategies that are unique to your family so that your child makes optimal progress. Assessments, observations, priorities, interests and resources provide information that is used when the team meets at regular intervals to evaluate progress, establish goals, and design strategies. The information goes into the IFSP document.

Families play a central role in determining the communication avenues used by the child, family, and other members in the child’s life. The IFSP puts a plan of action in place that considers:

• Parents' preferences, given the full spectrum of choices and resources/organizations supporting each choice
• The family's strengths/resources, concerns/needs and abilities
• The child's strengths, needs and abilities
• The child's early communication attempts
• The child's language development
• The child's overall developmental progress
• The parents' understanding that communication choices made can be changed as the family and child change
  

Benefits to the Family

The IFSP assures families:

• a predictable process for discussing and documenting the child's and family's changing needs
• "family-centered services" in which both the child's needs and needs of the larger family will be considered
• a focus on outcomes deemed most important to the family
• a "living" document that changes and grows as the needs of the child and family change
• a written plan of who will do what, when and where for a 6-12 month period of time
• both family and professional input to the development and implementation of plans
• access to available educational, medical, and social services in a community to help the family and their child
• the expertise of BCFHRC professionals (speech-language pathologists and teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing) and/or recommendations to seek input from other professional disciplines (for example, physical and occupational therapy, social work, nursing, nutrition, psychology, vision consultant, infant development)
• coordination of those special services across agencies and professionals in a manner attractive and useful to the individual family (for example, joint sessions with Infant Development Program Consultant, regular consultation with Audiologist for IFSPlanning)

Benefits to the Professionals

The IFSP allows the team of professionals to:

• engage family members as colleagues in a team effort to help the child develop
• access family expertise and knowledge about the child's preferences and needs
• share their expertise with the family and with each other
• reduce redundancy of information and service and prioritize efforts
• discuss shared interests for the child and family
• understand the context of the family in which the child is living and growing