Project Search

What is Project SEARCH?

Project SEARCH is an employment-focussed education programme, designed to give students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities the opportunity to develop employability skills and to get hands on experience in the workplace, combined with classroom sessions. Project SEARCH began at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio USA as a result of a need to recruit and retain staff for relatively routine, yet complex jobs, which had high staff turnover levels. Together with frequent requests from disability organisations to provide supported employment opportunities this led to the establishment of Project SEARCH. This quickly became a successful way of introducing students to working at the hospital in a supportive way, leading to many of the students becoming employees of the hospital. To find out more please download the What is Project SEARCH? documents here and here...

Why is Hiring People with Disabilities Important to a Hospital?

Cincinnati Children's Hospital believe that as an organisation that serves the public, their employees should mirror the public. This is one of many reasons they give as to why hiring people with learning disabilities is important to a hospital. More reasons can be found here...  

Standards

All Project SEARCH programmes must sign a licensing agreement through Project SEARCH/Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre. The licensing agreement states that the local programme must adhere to the standards of Project SEARCH. Those standards can be downloaded here...

High School Transition Programme

The Project SEARCH high school transition programme 'typical day' scenario can be found here...