Personalisation in Social Care

Understanding how personalisation is being put into practice in social care is crucial if we want to map how it could be adopted in the homelessness sector.

Context

Personalisation reforms are happening at a local level, driven by local authority commissioners. Some are adopting a pilot approach and others transforming all their services at once. Many are working closely with the social enterprise In-Control which developed the concept and practice of self-directed support.

Whilst there is substantial room for local interpretation of personalisation, Putting People First also sets out a model for personalisation that all local authorities are expected to have made significant progress towards by 2011. These include:

• Commissioning which supports high quality care and maximum dignity, choice and control for service users. Support for third sector and private sector innovation
• A universal ‘one stop shop’ information, advice and advocacy service which will be open to anyone, irrespective of their eligibility for public funding
• A common assessment process with greater emphasis on self assessment
• Person centred planning and person directed support: service users plan and maintain control over their own individually-tailored support
• Everyone who is eligible for publicly-funded social care support to have a personal budget, other than where people require emergency access to provision. This means that an amount of money will be allocated in a transparent way to each service user, who will have choice over how their budget is spent. Brokerage,  or the provision of advice about choosing services, is an important model that usually runs alongside personal budgets
• An increase in direct payments, where a service user is paid the money allocated to their support in cash to spend as they wish.

Some of these approaches may be transferable to the homelessness sector.

The impact of personalisation on social care

In-Control’s evaluation of the second phase of their work indicated that more than half of those taking up self-directed support were people with learning disabilities, followed by people with physical disabilities and older people. There has been some uptake amongst people with mental health issues but the model remains relatively undeveloped for people with substance issues. Personalisation is least tested with client groups that tend to use homelessness services.

Evaluation of self-directed support has found that service users reported positive outcomes in most areas, and that there were also financial savings. Service users have commonly chosen to spend their budgets on leisure activities, transport and care to stay in their own homes.

In-Control’s interviews with two local authorities, Hartlepool and Oldham give an idea of how local authorities are moving over to personalisation in practice and the cost savings made.