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The Service Provider Perspective: “What Services Do I Need and Want?” Vs. the Thoughts of Service Providers.
Service providers aim to provide services that will benefit the service users. The service users often receive services they do not find useful, need, want or like. There are several reasons for the discrepancies ranging from not being heard, not finding the right professionals, to having bureaucratic reasons why the right kind of service is not funded for the individual. More importantly, and more often than not, the service provider may not know what is the best service they should provide.
Objectives:
The aim is to explore how service providers and services are found, what are the services that are found to be useful by the services users and which ones are not, why people drop out from services, and do professionals and individuals with ASC have the same answers to these questions.
Methods:
An online web survey and phone interview survey was conducted in Finland. Two entities were contacted: professionals who work with ASC and individuals with ASC. Individuals at the age 15 or above were targeted due to the national school curriculum after which services are provided by other organisations than schools.
Results:
The ongoing survey has reached by now 580 professionals and 152 individuals with ASC. In the poster we will present the survey participant demographics more thoroughly and the analyses of the survey data.
Conclusions:
The survey results will be discussed in relation to the way service providers should try to impact their service design to reach correct outcomes but also to have services that are found to be useful by the service user. We will also suggest that data should be used to alter the ways funding is placed on different services by municipalities and by the state in order to have the voices of the services users to be h