Personalisation

“Personalisation means thinking about public services and social care in an entirely different way – starting with the person rather than the service. It will require the transformation of adult social care.” Julie Jones, Chief Executive, SCIE
 

So what is personalisation really?

It is an attempt by the Government to move social care from providing individuals with a set of services, to supporting them to live a life, which originated in learning disability services through the “In Control” programme.

There have also been a number of pilot projects throughout the country that have been evaluated.  This has provided guidance and led to the development of a toolkit for local authorities.

Personalisation is designed to be much more flexible than direct payments because it gives individual options to people who do not want to manage the money themselves as well as those that do.

The whole process is based on a much simpler (self) assessment which identifies the overall level of need a person has.  This is then translated into a designated budget rather than an offer of specific services.

The individual, along with those they want supporting them then decide how the budget is to be spent.  They are given help and advice with this including information about the costs of existing services.  The money can be managed by the individual or by someone else on their behalf, such as social services or another agency.

Personalised budgets must be offered to anyone needing long term social care support by 31 March 2011, but emergency and very short term services are excluded.  At the moment the only services we know will be included are social care services but it is possible it may also cover some Supporting People and Health funded support.

What are Derbyshire County Council Doing?

They have set up a programme board and employed a programme manager, Katey Twyford to lead the work.  In addition Louise Swain is leading the work on stakeholder engagement which covers working with the public as well as the voluntary and independent sectors.  The programme has seven separate projects some of which will involve representation from the voluntary sector in addition to involvement from service users and family carers.  These are:

•      Information, advice and advocacy

•      Self-directed support

•      Service redesign

•      Lifetime homes

•      Web based purchasing

•      Organisational Stability

•      Stakeholder engagement 

What are the key issues for the Voluntary Sector?

•      Getting involved in the planning stage

•      Training and development needs to understand and prepare for the changes

•      Supporting individuals concerned by the planned changes

•      Changing patterns of commissioning with a move from block contracts

•      Marketing services to individuals rather than to the statutory sector

•      Offering additional services such as brokerage, budget management  and/or employment

•      Power shift from commissioners to service users

For more Information see

The Social Care Institute for Excellence: www.scie.org.uk 

The Rough Guide to Personalisation http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/reports/report20.asp

Department of Health personalisation web pages

www.dh.gov.uk/en/SocialCare/Socialcarereform/Personalisation/index.htm

In-Control:  www.in-control.org.uk

The IBSEN project – National evaluation of the Individual Budgets Pilot Projects

http://php.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/research/summs/ibsen.php

Care Services Improvement Partnership personalisation toolkit

www.integratedcarenetwork.gov.uk/Personalisation/PersonalisationToolkit

 The CSIP site offers information on the actual process of ‘transformation’ with the toolkit used by all LA’s  http://networks.csip.org.uk/personalisation/PersonalisationToolkit/

Locally www.derbyshire.gov.uk will have a section dedicated to their personalisation programme

With thanks to North Derbyshire Voluntary Action for allowing us to reproduce this article