The new vision for social care set out in ‘Putting People First’ has been centre stage for some time now but around the country councils are at very different stages of progress. In April last year we saw the allocation of the Adult Social Care Reform Grant to help councils deliver this vision. There are many aspects to the agenda including improved integrated working with health, better and more meaningful involvement of stakeholders and carers in commissioning and service planning, safeguarding and crucially person centred care planning.
There is no new legislation to aid the move to greater personalisation and the increase in personal budgets. Understanding how the new vision can be achieved within the existing legal framework is crucial to a council putting in place robust assessment and care planning processes.
The ADSS, LGA and DoH last year jointly produced a timetable of milestones to enable councils to measure progress in implementing the personalisation agenda. This timetable had the expectation that all councils would by April 2010 have introduced personal budgets for existing and new service users/ carers and that by October 2010 all new service users/carers would be offered a personal budget alongside this offer being made to those service users whose care plans were being reviewed. By April of next year there is a target of 30% of service users having a personal budget.
These milestones will be used by both the DoH in considering resource allocation and the CQC to feed into the CAA process.
Is your council meeting these milestones? You may be far ahead or you may still be at the start of this journey. Our work with local authorities and with health bodies puts us at the very centre of policies such as personalisation and in that work we have already considered some of the hard questions councils have been facing in formulating their approach and putting together internal policies and processes.
If you would like to discuss personalisation and how Bevan Brittan could help your authority, please contact Caraline Johnson, Senior Associate.