What's next for personalised care and support?
A number of actions that are planned or underway to support next steps for personalised care and support will be outlined at the National Children's and Adults Services Conference today, following the recent Personalisation of Care Summit hosted by Care Services Minister Norman Lamb.
The actions include:
- support to integrate health and care through personal budgets for soon to be announced pioneer sites
- support for all councils to use practical benchmarking tools to measure the outcomes people experience when using personal budgets
- the development of new standards of excellence when commissioning for outcomes
- nine English regions signing up to TLAP regional support programmes
- focused support to councils who need it most through sector-led improvement programmes
- updating the Think Local Act Personal partnership agreement.
September's Summit confirmed the strong consensus that significant progress has been made towards delivering personalisation. However, while the numbers of people accessing personal budgets have risen significantly, urgent attention is required to ensure personal budgets and the wider personalisation agenda delivers the best outcomes for people, carers and families.
The Think Local Act Personal Partnership is coordinating the post-summit action plan alongside the Department of Health, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS), the Local Government Association through its Towards Excellence in Adult Social Care programme, key provider organisations and the wider TLAP Partnership, including people who use services and carers.
Central to this work is acknowledgement that strong leadership is needed to drive through the further changes required to secure a sustainable system of personalised care and support for the future.
The summit identified four themes as the basis for personalised care and support in the future:
• Promoting and embedding culture change
• Improving people's experience of personalisation
• Stimulating and supporting market diversity
• Assurance, performance and accountability
Promoting and embedding culture change
The leadership of care and support organisations, including central and local government, provider organisations and sector improvement bodies must remain committed to further developing personalised, community-based support. Crucially, this leadership must include the wider workforce and people who use services, carers and family members as equal partners, working collaboratively towards shared solutions.
Improving people's experience of personalisation
There is still a considerable way to go to ensure people experience genuine choice and control and personalised support in all settings. There are large and concerning variances in personal budgets uptake from one area to the next. There are also significant opportunities for personal health budgets and personal budgets that integrate support across health and care
Stimulating and supporting market diversity
Stronger effort is required in ensuring people who use services, carers and families are equal partners in designing, commissioning and delivering services, and are recognised as individual commissioners and contributors to shaping local markets of care and support.
Assurance, performance and accountability
There is an increasing body of evidence for what works best in implementing personalisation and many solutions are already available and need to be shared and embedded.
What's next?
TLAP will coordinate further development of the cross-sector action plan, identifying
key objectives and specific actions that will set the framework for securing and advancing further progress with personalisation for the next two years and in advance of the Care Bill.