Direct support professional training in Utah is governed by the Department of Health and Human Services' Division of Services for People with Disabilities (DSPD), with the operative requirements written into the approved Community Supports Waiver (UT.0158, July 2025 renewal) Appendix C provider qualification grids. Those grids bind every provider agency delivering waiver services to people with intellectual disabilities, related conditions, and acquired brain injury.

Initial training covers a broad topic set: individual rights, abuse/neglect/exploitation, the provider Code of Conduct, confidentiality, orientation specific to the ID/RC/ABI populations served, medication topics including client-specific medications, communicable disease, protective-services reporting, emergency and crisis response, positive behavior supports, and client-specific needs. CPR certification is due within 90 days of hire.

Within six months, staff complete a second block: behavior crisis intervention through an accepted commercial system — Mandt, SOAR, and PART are all accepted — plus DSPD rules and philosophy, the Americans with Disabilities Act, fraud prevention, and person-centered support planning. From year two onward, DSPs complete 12 hours of training annually, with behavior topics included in licensed sites, alongside annual administrative renewals. DSPD verifies provider training compliance annually, which makes clean records a survey-critical asset.

Medication and crisis intervention are the gated items: medication training includes client-specific components, and behavior crisis training must come from one of the accepted systems (Mandt, SOAR, or PART) — a multi-vendor field rather than a single-vendor lock. Agency leadership completes DSPD's online MySupport orientation, but that is a leadership onboarding, not the DSP curriculum.

Delivery model: Utah is provider-delivered and open-market for the DSP curriculum. The waiver grids define what must be trained and by when; they do not name a state platform or single vendor for the core topics, and the one area with named systems — behavior crisis — accepts multiple commercial options. Providers document their own training programs and stand for DSPD's annual verification.

Training and eTracking Solutions provides online DSP training built for Utah's requirements — courses mapped to the UT.0158 Appendix C topic grids (rights, ANE, confidentiality, communicable disease, positive behavior supports, person-centered planning, ADA, fraud), automatic tracking of the 90-day CPR and 6-month deadlines, and a 12-hour annual cycle that re-assigns itself from year two. When DSPD's annual verification comes, the documentation is already organized the way the grids read.