The effectiveness of person-centred planning for people with intellectual disabilities: A systematic review.
Person-centred planning helps adults with ID get out more and choose daily activities, but gains stay modest unless you add strong community supports.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team looked at every study on person-centred planning for people with intellectual disabilities.
They found 15 papers that tested PCP between 1990 and 2015.
Most studies were small and weak in design, but all tracked real-life outcomes like jobs, friends, and daily choices.
What they found
PCP gave a medium boost to community outings and picking daily activities.
Work outcomes were all over the map—some people got jobs, many did not.
Overall, the gains were real but modest, and the evidence quality was low.
How this fits with other research
Navas et al. (2025) extends these findings. They showed that moving to community living plus daily choice-making gives very large gains in life skills.
Perry et al. (2024) also extends the story. Their four-year study found that when staff give choices and reasons, motivation and well-being rise.
van der Miesen et al. (2024) and Hithersay et al. (2014) include this review in their bigger maps of adult services, confirming PCP is one piece of a larger puzzle.
Why it matters
Use PCP as a starting tool, not a miracle fix. Pair it with staff training on daily choice-making and real community access. Track simple counts: how many new places the client visits each week and how often they pick the activity.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the effectiveness of Person-Centred Planning (PCP) on outcomes for individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) across the age range. METHOD: The electronic databases PsycInfo, Embase, CINHAL, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus and Medline were searched for studies evaluating the impact of PCP on people with ID, published between 1990 and 2014; these were supplemented by manual searches of reference lists. Studies were considered irrespective of methodology, sample size and publication source, if outcomes reflected the impact of PCP on individuals with ID. RESULTS: Seven quantitative, five qualitative and four mixed methods studies were included in the review. The overall quality of the evidence was low but suggestive that PCP may have a positive, yet moderate, impact on some outcomes for individuals with ID, particularly community-participation, participation in activities and daily choice-making. For other outcomes such as employment the findings were inconsistent. CONCLUSION: The evidence supporting the effectiveness of PCP is limited and does not demonstrate that PCP can achieve radical transformations in the lives of people with ID. Clearer descriptions of PCP and its components are needed. Small-scale successful demonstrations of effectiveness exist, but its clinical, cost-effectiveness and wider implementation must be investigated in large scale studies.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2016.06.015