CRC Strategic Plan 2017-2021

We are delighted to present this Strategic Plan for the Central Remedial Clinic, covering the next five years.

Meeting the needs of our clients1 is what the CRC is about. For decades, the CRC has been at the forefront of delivering excellent, and often pioneering services to children and adults with disabilities. Many of our clients have significant disabilities and our services – ranging from our schools to adult training and development, our clinical and therapeutic work to specialist services – are designed to help our clients and their families enjoy a better quality of life as equal citizens.

Our focus is to advocate inclusion, to enable development, and to facilitate choices for how people with disabilities can lead active and fulfilled lives.

This new strategic plan is to ensure that we continue to deliver high-quality services to our clients, and that we can build on this platform of excellence to strengthen our work and to develop our portfolio of services. At the same time, we will be implementing two new major national policies, Progressing Disability Services (PDS) and New Directions (ND), which will have significant implications for some of our services and our clients and will change the shape of service delivery as we have traditionally known it. This will mean providing more broadly-based disability services in addition to the highly specialist services for which we have become renowned for over many years.

Over the next five years, we will continue to develop our national profile and strengthen our national specialist work; in areas such as our Gait Lab, assistive technology and specialised seating, national clinical specialist services for people with complex physical disabilities and national outreach support. We are also conscious that there are parts of the Country which are under-provided in terms of disability services, and we will examine opportunities for new developments in those areas, either on our own or in partnership with local providers.

Funding is always a challenge for an organisation like the CRC, with 95% of our services funded by the State, we will be working hard over the next five years to examine other opportunities and potential funding streams, with a central focus on ensuring our financial sustainability long into the future.

Of course, to achieve our objectives we will require further investment in our staff, in renewal of our premises, and in information technology. A central part of this strategy involves the continued strengthening of our organisational infrastructure, which will be essential in meeting high standards of quality in an environment of increasing regulation and higher client and public expectations.

In preparation for this Strategic Plan, we have consulted with our people widely, we have listened to them and we believe that we have truly captured the essence of what we need to focus on and what we need to get right. The five-year period of this Strategic Plan will represent a turning point for the CRC, and by the year 2021 we will be an even stronger organisation responding to changing demands, higher standards, raised public expectations, and new national policies, whilst maintaining our focus and our independence to meet the needs of our clients and stakeholders with the same spirit that applied when we were founded in 1951.

Kieran J Timmins Chairperson, CRC 

Stephanie Manahan Chief Executive Officer, CRC