Your rights and responsibilities

Consumer Directed Services gives you real authority. It also assigns you real obligations. Both halves are worth knowing before you start.

Your rights

• Choose your own attendant, subject only to the spousal exclusion and background screening.
• Choose your vendor, and change vendors without losing your authorized services.
• Direct your own care — decide how and when authorized tasks are performed.
• Discharge an attendant who is not meeting your needs.
• Be treated with dignity and have your privacy respected in your own home.
• Have your information kept confidential, and disclosed only as law permits.
• Raise a complaint without retaliation, and have it addressed.
• Appeal a state decision that reduces or denies your services.
• Receive services free from discrimination, with interpretation at no cost to you.
• See your own records that we hold about you.

How to raise a concern →

Your responsibilities

These come from RSMo 208.909 and from the program’s operating rules:

• Supervise your attendant and verify the wages paid to them.
• Prepare and submit timesheets biweekly, signed by both you and your attendant.
• Notify the department within ten days of any change in circumstances affecting your care plan or your residence.
• Report significant health changes that affect your ability to direct your own care.
• Report quality problems to the vendor first, and escalate to the department if unresolved.
• Provide the information we need to establish employer identification numbers.
• Allow required quality assurance activities, including annual home visits.
• Sign only accurate timesheets.

Why the timesheet rule is not a formality

What we owe you

• Accurate, on-time payroll for your attendant.
• Clear orientation and ongoing help understanding the program.
• Straight answers about what the program does and does not allow.
• A response when you raise a concern.
• Confidentiality of your personal and health information.
• No pressure about who you hire.