Choice, Control and Obfuscation – How the Personalisation Dream is Dying

In the bold move towards a transformation in adult social care, it feels from where I sit, that control has completely overtaken any pretence of ‘choice’ in the so-called move towards more idealised ‘person-centred’ care and support planning.

I hope I’ve been clear over the years in which I’ve expressed a remarkably consistent view that I love the idea of people being able to choose the support plan they like from a wide menu of options with ‘professionals’ taking less of a role.  I am a massive fan of direct payments. I want people to have more personalised care and more creative care. Desperately. The options just aren’t there yet for people who lack capacity and that is a terrible disservice and inequity that is being served throughout the care system.

Removing care planning from my role doesn’t concern me – unlike those people on the training courses who bang the drums blindly about how wonderful and bright it looks when we allow people to choice whatever they like to put together packages of care, I don’t want ‘retain control’, I truly don’t believe that I, as a professional ‘know better’,  but likewise I know that with the user group I work with, it is rare that I can just hand someone a support planning tool and a list of potential providers and tell them to ‘get on with it’.

That is as far from reality now as it was 20 years ago in my work. While I can say that everyone I care co-ordinate who has a ‘package of care’ is now officially on a ‘personal budget’ and some even have direct payments, it hasn’t really increased choice or control for any but a couple of those people.

If anyone for a moment wants to ponder the duplicitious nature of those in policy making ivory towers who dribble down policies which they want to couch in ‘soft’ language so they are difficult to challenge, one only has to read a fantastic piece of research conducted and published on The Small Places site.

It is worth reading through the piece in detail. Lucy, the author, made a number of requests to local authorities to ask about how their Resource Allocation Systems (the link between the ‘assessment’ and the ‘cash’ – basically) was calculated.  She seemed to come up against a wall of obfuscation but it’s worth looking at her research in detail.

This reluctance for me, seems to relate to the lack and reduction in spending on care and support – the key ‘missing piece’ as to why a council can ‘reassess’ someone as needing less ‘cash’ than they did last year with a more traditional care package.

My personal experience is that the council I work in (and this is similar to things I’ve heard from people in other councils) probably doesn’t want to share it’s RAS because it’s ashamed of the utter dog’s dinner that it’s made of it. It doesn’t ‘work’. It doesn’t make sense. It is frequently changed. There is more emphasis on physical health needs as opposed to mental health needs and while there can be manual adjustments, some of the figures that are ‘spat out’ just seem nigh on ridiculous (and that works for sometimes calculating care ‘too high’ as much as a figure which is ‘too low’).  It comes down to everything needing to be qualified and fitted onto a spreadsheet when actually the needs of two people who might fill out a self-assessment with the same ‘tick boxes’ might have very different needs in reality – no RAS can account for that. One person might under-score because they are embarrassed by the process and don’t want to admit to being incontinent on an initial visit from a social worker because they haven’t been able to tell anyone other than their GP – another person might be anxious and think they can manage less well than they can. Sometimes and this is what local authorities and health services seem to find hard to account for, you just have to treat people and their needs as individuals rather than the subject of outcome measures, tick box performance indicators or resource allocation systems.

Shouldn’t personalisation be about putting the user at the heart of the system? Every user should have a copy of the RAS and how the figure was determined. Which questions are weighted and which aren’t. Without that, there flow of money and the control rests solely with the local authority.

I’m fully against ‘traditional’ care packages. Having someone anonymous and constantly changing pop in for a 30 min welfare check once a day isn’t about improving the quality, control and choice in someone’s life, it’s about a local authority doing the absolute bare minimum that they can get away with to fulfil their statutory duties of care.

The lack of openness about the ways that the RAS shows the true colours of the reasons for these pushes towards the Eden of ‘Personalisation’.

While I have no doubt that for some people, as I keep saying, those with advocates, family or who are able to voice their own needs clearly, have and will continue to benefit enormously from having direct payments – it’s worth remembering that direct payments have been available and accessible for many years now.

Forcing everyone onto personal budgets has only discriminated against those with carers by reducing the amounts of money they are entitled to through the RAS (that’s my own experience of how our local RAS works) and has discriminated against those who lack capacity by promising all sorts of ‘creative’ ways of exploring third party management of support plans but without providing any real ways of accessing it (this is my current bugbear as I have been requesting assistance with this for months for service users I work with but have been told it is not possible for older adults yet as only those with learning disabilities have budgets large enough to make it cost effective – thereby clearing discriminating on the basis of age and type of disability).

I have changed from a fervent advocate of a system which was supposed to be so much better for everyone to a bitter opponent of a system which favours some kinds of disabilities over others, some kinds of service users over others, some kinds of carers (those who are willing to put a lot more time in to manage and support plan where necessary) than others and all to provide fewer services under the guise of choice.

No wonder Burstow is pushing everyone towards direct payments. He is pushing everyone towards a system which masks the way that payments are determined and discriminates openly against people who lack capacity or who have the ‘wrong’ kind of disability or family support.

Now we know that the local authorities can hide the way they make financial calculations, it becomes much more obvious to see behind the facade of the ‘Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ who promotes choice as the final goal to achieve at all costs.

I feel tricked and betrayed by the implementation of the personalisation agenda and the lack of any of the services around it to tackle directly with the problems at it’s heart.

I was deeply disappointed, for example, that the Mental Health Foundation’s ‘research’ and work with people specifically with dementia only focussed on people who either had capacity or had family.  Their advice talks lovingly of setting up trust funds, appointing brokers – well, that is a fantasy rather than a reality and exists only on paper as a choice. They merely replicated a lot of work which was done when direct payments were rolled out around lack of take up for people with dementia and they hadn’t said anything new (I happened to write my dissertation about the lack of take up of direct payments for older adults so did actually do literature researches at the time..).

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

For now, I think it’s important that we who see through the cosy policy makers congratulating about a ‘job well done’ speak up and speak up loudly for those for whom the system is a further barrier for true individualised care because these self-same policy-makers see them as ‘too difficult’.

My title explains that the personalisation dream is dying but it isn’t dead yet. To be brought back to life, all those involved need to embrace the principles of honesty and openness and not blind themselves to their successes if they can’t see the continuing barriers.

Technology, Social Media and Social Services – Finding new ways to ‘help’

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I have some across lots of discussions and debates about ways of using social media and new technologies and interactions to ‘help’ social services become more effective. Most of it seems to revolve around building online directories and databases of micro providers and services that are available which build on so-called community capacity to improve the way that personal budgets can or might work.

At the risk of sounding overly cynical there is nothing ‘innovative’ in my mind about building a directory of services.  To me, this is not a particularly innovative way to use ‘technology’ in social services.  It taking a very obvious and well-trodden route to using new technologies. Providing directories while being useful to a certain group of people again exacerbates the isolation of those who are not party to or able to use them.  Being innovative isn’t always necessary to be helpful but it is very important that new ideas are focussed so we don’t just end up with increasingly specialised, localised directories that might have more ‘interactive’ features and feedback, look more ‘user led’ and compatible with the buzz words of social media but in the end they are brushing the surface of possibilities.

It feels more and more as if that there is a growing division between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ as far as personal budgets have been extended and does absolutely nothing to address or use technologies to address those who reside continually in the ‘have not’ section.

While at work, we labour with database systems that have clearly been developed through conversations between commissioners and software companies without any recourse to frontline practitioners, nice new provider directories are being tinkered around with while the fundamental foundations of the systems we work with remain resolutely inaccessible.

I’ve had a few ideas myself and whilst I lack the technological expertise to see any of these ideas to fruition, this is a kind of ‘wish list’ of the sorts of things I’d like to see.  I’m under no illusion that these are ‘new’ ideas. I am sure similar things already exist in some form but they are things I’d like to see pan out in the longer run. Things I’d like to use at work.

I’d like to see more creativity in the use of technologies to assist with decision making for adults who have some kind of cognitive deficit. I’m a great fan of the ‘tablet’ and ‘touch screen’ model as I think it is intuitively an easier interface to understand.  When I see people instinctively reach out to touch the screen of my Kindle (which isn’t touchscreen!) I realise that we are becoming conditioned to seek the easiest input methods which are about touching a screen and speaking into a microphone and perhaps writing on a tablet. Now, voice recognition has improved, I’m yet to come across very successful handwriting recognition (possibly because I have scrawly almost illegible handwriting) but there is potential there. In the meantime, pictures and touchscreens seem like a good way to go.

Using pictures/sounds/music it can draw on multi-media ‘shows’ and explanations of different options – moving beyond the ‘written word’. Providing documentation in aural form or in pictorial/moving form rather than reams of leaflets. Having recordings of familiar voices or pictures of familiar faces might help to reassure. I’m a great fan of telecare in general with the proviso of always being mindful that the human contact is not replaced but in days where human contact is sparsely provisioned anyway, it may be something that can be experimented with.

Why not a YouTube type video to explain how services can be chosen instead of reams of ‘easy read’ leaflets which really aren’t remotely ‘easy read’. Instead of flooding people with lists of providers (which, while good for some ignores those who are restricted in terms of capacity and carers to choose ‘freely’ the types of services they garner) why not explain and expound in different ways the ways that services can work?

Why not explain providers in terms of what they can actually provide and what purpose they serve rather than creating directories that are meant for people with a good understanding of what they want and need?

I was in a day centre last week and there was a seemingly unused Wii. I wonder if he Kinect might be a better project to develop some type of interactive play, exercise and work as it doesn’t need a controller at all and uses the more innovative way of body movement.  Using participatory games with larger screens in company can provide different stimuli. I know why games developers  haven’t tackled directly the ‘older’ market with games that might otherwise reside in memories but why not repackage old school yard games and board games with Kinects and iPads? It may be a good way to introduce the use of these new technologies in a ‘friendly’ manner which may then see them used in other wider ways – such as directories or personalised information sources. Using YouTube video channels for personally designed ‘reminiscence’ therapies could personalise the delivery of memories and digitise memory boxes where items are not there to build up the frames of someone’s life and people aren’t there to fill in the gaps.

There are many ‘dating site’ type services that match people and organisations. Volunteers to voluntary groups etc. How about a type of match between schools and residential homes? I know it’s something that’s sometimes done locally where I work and having spoken to both providers and some of the kids who go in, they seem to enjoy it and it can change and break expectations – each of the other.  I

We talk of social media a lot and often it is used to provide ‘recommendations’ to particular services through these databases. Perhaps more user and carer led general recommendations can be collated. Crowd source an ‘introduction’ to social services provisions by those currently using the service.

Ask ‘what do you wish you’d known?’ ‘what do you wish someone had told you?’ and while taking out all the obviously libellous stuff, a local authority must be brave enough to leave in the criticisms. We learn through complains and criticisms and it can take a lot of guts (or anger) to make a complaint or to criticism and that MUST be respected by the service and the individuals at fault and used as a means of improvement.

I don’t want to see local authorities ‘whitewash’ problems in order to gain sparkling OFSTED or CQC inspections. It sullies the whole process and makes the inspections worthless. Regulation should be less authoritarian and more about actually making improvements and making things better for the end user – not about allowing local authorities to produce the ‘right’ results while poor practice is brushed away from the sight of the inspectors.

But back to my point about using social media to crowdsource – it is important that social media ALONE is not used as an ‘answer’. Crowd sourcing must be honest but it must also be broader than putting out an ‘internet consultation’ and having a Twitter account or blog. There must be pounding of the streets too to engage those who are not able to use digital means to put their points across. There should be knocking at doors and face to face discussions – not leaflets, not inaccessible (for some) groups.

Talking about crowdsourcing though, there’s a much better and perhaps more obvious way it can be used and certainly isn’t being used at the moment and that’s to engage other social workers and professionals into putting together more information and useful methods of practice for ourselves. Sure, it needs time but we remain reliant on organisations to provide ‘guidance’ such as SCIE (who do provide fantastic resources) and BASW and the College of Social Work but why none of these organisations who purport to exist to help social work and social care practice actually engage more directly and use social media and open access blogs/discussion groups/forums/micro blogging etc to engage with currently practicing social workers is completely beyond me.

I’ve become very interested in open access education and resources and feel there is great scope for professional engagement and information to build its own resources and information together with users and carers, together with other professionals but there has to be a push for social workers to see the benefit of sharing and finding appropriate ways to share the information that we learn every day.

I have other ideas which will come in different posts  but I’d be interested in hearing other peoples’ ideas for uses of ‘technology’ in the very broadest sense and how they can develop to help the broadest range of people we see in social services – particularly those who are less able to look information up in various fancy online directories.

Selling the NHS – The Beginning

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Yesterday, while most of the media, fixated self-referentially on the Murdoch hearings and Cameron was flying back into the country,  Lansley began to dismantle the National Health Service.

As The Guardian reports

In the first wave, beginning in April, eight NHS areas – including musculoskeletal services for back pain, adult hearing services in the community, wheelchair services for children, and primary care psychological therapies for adults – will be open for “competition on quality not price”. If successful, the “any qualified provider” policy would from 2013 see non-NHS bodies allowed to deliver more complicated clinical services in maternity and “home chemotherapy”.

So we are led to believe that being open for ‘competition on quality not price’ will act to pat us on the head, reassure us, and direct us back to the ‘big media story’.

It worries me and it worries me for a number of reasons. Lansley’s words are couched in the words of ‘choice’ but I wonder exactly whose ‘choice’ it will be to make these commissioning decisions for which, no doubt, large amounts of money will change hands and profit-making publicly listed and private companies will be able to partake.

I admit to a bias having been exposed and having experience in the adult care sector which was subject to a similar rollout of competition which was supposed to increase choice and quality.

I’ve written many times about the end result and how it is one that has inherently favoured larger providers and companies that have been able to deliver on economies of scale rather than the poetic vision of small scale providers delivering local services. Those small scale providers were quickly priced out of the market and I fear this will happen again.

But wait, I hear, ‘quality not price’ Lansley says.. to which I reply, ‘nonsense’.

Why? Because there will probably be minimum standards of ‘quality’ that a service has to reach and beyond those, it will be a price competition. That’s what is supposed to happen in care – but who checks the standards? who will check the standards? How can we have confidence in a well-resourced and well-delivered service when regulators are so weak.

I do not want any private company to make a profit on my potential need for services for my back pain, my hearing or a child’s wheelchair.

Of course, making the publicly delivered service is clearly both too expensive and veering against the government doctrine of handing the healthcare to private companies.

I am sure the first few providers will intersperse local voluntary organisations with large multinational corporations in their delivery methods. Again, I point to the adult social care sector. We started along the path with the NHS and Community Care Act (1990) having a lot of local providers together with a few Southern Crosses and Care UKs. The local providers were eventually priced out.

Of course in the case of podiatry and hearing services as well as primary care psychological therapies, we can see these as almost discreet services. The ones that will potentially be easy to deliver and it will always be possible to find wonderfully successful outcomes for people choosing Boots rather than the local NHS for their podiatry appointments because it is more convenient. And I’m sure it seems to pave the way for Individual Health Budgets where people  are given the money to ‘spend’ on the services that they need. Choice you see. Choice is what it’s all about.

I turn back and look at what has happened in social care. Choice has been extended in wonderful ways to those with the loudest voices but in some ways those with the highest needs have been left behind. That is my main concern about the introduction of private into public.

For some people, the people in the comfortable middle classes of Chipping Norton, this is fantastic news – they can access their IAPT (or equivalent) by a local provider when they are feeling a bit down. They can have their feet checked in a local branch of Boots instead of having to travel into Oxford. All’s well.

Those will be the areas where both competition and choice are the highest.

My concern is that people who experience the degradation of poverty will have quieter voices and less choice because there may be higher multiples of health difficulties and choice is determined through power. I can’t help but think of people who are restricted in their choice by issues of capacity. Will they be given advocates to assist with the process or will they just be ignored? Will the choice by made by GPs who are courted by these private companies, just as they are currently courted by drugs companies?

How equitable will the ‘new’ system be?

If we are extending choice, we have to extend safeguards and checks.

If we are extending choice, we have to extend quality.

It hasn’t happened in social care – there is no reason to believe or trust that it will happen in healthcare.

It does make me wonder – Are we all in this together? Really? With the impact analysis projects that are carried out to ensure equality, I know there are provisions to look at ability and disability, gender etc but are social class and income level also considered?

And think – Lansley considers putting ‘quality’ in as a concession – he was happy to go ahead with the Bill and with a pure ‘cost’ factor. This is his so-called concession but it is no concession at all if we don’t have a definition of what ‘quality’ is. After all, the CQC – too look at the Health Care regulator – defines ‘quality’ on the basis of paper documents and paper inspections given to them by provider services.

If that doesn’t wave any red flags, I don’t know what will.

This is a government of interests rather than representatives. The shame is that the last government was too and likely all the future ones will be as long as we allow our heads to be turned more quickly by celebrity gossip than the tragedies unfolding in our adult care services.

Related articles

• Private sector firms invited to bid for £1bn slice of NHS (independent.co.uk)
• NHS services to be opened up to competition (guardian.co.uk)
• More competition planned for NHS (bbc.co.uk)

Elaine McDonald, Kensington and Chelsea and Dignity

Yesterday, the High Court ruled in the case of R (on the application of McDonald)  v Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This was a further appeal by McDonald against a previous decision at a lower court.

Elaine McDonald is 68 year old woman who worked as a ballerina in her younger days. The press seems to be a little fixated on her former career, and she does have a more glamorous background than many who come to rely heavily on social care so perhaps it is no surprise. Ms McDonald suffered from a debilitating stroke in 1999 and had a further fall in 2006 which led to very poor mobility.  Although not medically incontinent, she required assistance to use the commode during the night.  She had been provided with overnight support to meet her assessed needs related to continence during the night however Kensington and Chelsea were suggesting that this need could be met by substituting this assistance with the provision of continence pads during the night which would, by their nature, demand that Ms McDonald remain in these pads until carers could come in the morning and at intervals to ‘change’ her.

frabattista @ flickr

I wasn’t surprised by the decision by the High Court because there are precedents that led the access of local authorities to resources to be a factor in relation to the provision of services.

In my own working experience, it is impossible to access any kind of home care support overnight except in some very specific cases where there is very high need support and even then, it is much much more likely to be provided to younger adults with physical disabilities. I can count on the fingers of one hand the amounts of times I’ve come across local authority funded overnight support in the last 10+ years of practice.

Sometimes I have to take a step back from what I regard as ‘normal’ practice to understand the outrage at this decision. I realise how I become attuned to ‘local authority’ think and ‘budgetary’ think and that’s quite an uncomfortable thought.

We get used to applying different definitions of ‘dignity’ and what is acceptable because we are aware of the thousands of Ms McDonalds that require support and the existence of a  finite resource. So do you support the Ms McDonalds and assist them to provide a fuller and more dignified life at home or do you provide 8 Ms Smiths with respite care over the year. These are the realities of the decisions and it shouldn’t have to be so.

Perhaps that’s why I’m less surprised by the McDonald ruling and less surprised by it.

There are though horrendous inequities in our system of the provision of social care. Where Ms McDonald in Kensington and Chelsea may be receiving a vastly different service from a parallel Ms McDonald in Newham.  I would venture a guess that there are thousands of potentially very similar cases to Ms McDonald bubbling under the surface ‘in the system’ but because they are not ex-Prima ballerinas and don’t have the will, way and means to bring cases and involve solicitors, we will never know about them.

If anything is, quite literally, the ‘dirty secret’ of social care and health care provision particularly for older adults, it is this.

We have different standards of what we class as being ‘dignified’ for ourselves as for others. What might class as dignity to an older adult has less value and invites less spending to an equivalent younger adult with exactly the same care needs. Those who shout loudest get the most – as far as care is concerned and as far as public interest is concerned.  The shame and pity of the ‘personalisation’ agenda and the flawed implementation of personal budgets in social care have exacerbated this problem further rather than provided a channel to allow for a more equitable system of care delivery.

It sometimes feel cruel and harsh, because it is a cruel and harsh system that it perpetuated by discriminatory systems. Would the warehouse-style very large residential and nursing care homes with 100+ beds be acceptable for younger adults with similar care needs? I don’t think so.   I don’t mean to imply that every large care home is bad and every small care home is good. That isn’t the case. It’s about a fundamental reassessment of what is acceptable in the provision of care for older people in our society.

Lucy at The Small Places covers the issue of dignity through caselaw, in an excellent, thorough and educational post.

I make no apology for my less erudite post and thoughts.  The more I work and the more I reflect, the more interplay I see between the basic conceits of ethics and ethical judgement in the role that I play as a part of this system that condones this mealy mouthed interpretation of human rights merely on the basis of cost and resourcing issues.

It is accepted because our society is inherently ageist. We don’t want to think or pay for the care of older people. We care more about our collective inheritances and potential house prices than the more collective thoughts about where the boundaries of an acceptable level of care and dignity lie.

If anything, this has impressed on  me the importance of constant reflection on my practice and my work. I can advocate to an extent, from within the system, for the dignity of those like Ms McDonald and I try to. Some I win and some I lose but as long as I make my voice heard through every step of the process I can help to feed the voices ‘from the front line’ back to the more senior managers.

I make judgements and I am the mouthpiece of the local authority. I am an employee but the second that I become complacent, the  moment I stop reflecting on the effects the decisions I make have and the instant that I join that local authority ‘group think’, I lose my ethical compass and my professional judgement.

I talk a lot about important qualities of social workers and social care workers. Respect, empathy and to that I’d add advocacy. It might not always be seen in the internal battles that we fight, but we have to try to fight so as not to accept a ‘normal’ that is defined on the bank balance sheets of the local authority accountants.

Initial thoughts on the Dilnot Report on Funding of Care and Support

Scheduling and exhaustion meant I didn’t have time to look at the Dilnot proposals in detail yesterday so this morning I have fired up my browser and am going to make a few initial comments on the baseline main recommendations and hopefully over the next few days can look at some of the details.

The Dilnot Report on Funding of Care and Support runs at 82 pages.  It attempts to forge a solution for the currently antiquated and inequitable system of care funding that is currently in place. Much talk has been made of the current threshold of £23,250 of assets, at which people currently become responsible for paying for their own care services but little made of the current discounting of homes in certain circumstances and the ability to raise a charge on a property to postpone payment of costs for care services. Nevertheless, this threshold was deemed as being too low. People who own houses like to keep houses for children. People don’t like those who ‘haven’t worked as hard’ or ‘saved as much’ getting something for free.

The system is broken though, don’t get me wrong, I just think the focus of the discussion has been too much around middle class fears of actually paying for something they believe should be free. Now, I’ve got that off my chest, back to the report.

The main recommendations are

- to cap lifetime costs of care between £25,000 and £100,000 – with a suggested threshold (which is used throughout the report for ease) of £35,000

- means-tested assistance will be extended to those who have between £23,250 and £100,000 of assets.

- Those who ‘enter adulthood’ with support needs will not be means-tested and care will be provided free.

-Universal disability benefits will continue but may be some differences in names regarding Attendance Allowance. (erm.. DLA?).

- There will be a cap on so-called ‘hotel costs’ in residential care between £7,000-£10,000

-There should be a national, portable eligibility framework which is more transparent.

- A government awareness campaign about planning ahead and preparing for potential age-related disabilities. And their costs.

- There should be a new information and advice strategy to help people through the confusing forest of knowledge.

- Better carers support and information.

- More health and social care integration

Of course, these recommendation run alongside the Law Commission’s report for changes in adult social care law. Together they could create a much better and clearer system than we currently have.

The ‘lifetime cap’ allows for insurance policies to be generated and probably very profitable ones too for the insurance companies. Most people do not need high level social care provision but the fear generated by the media is enough to drive right minded people into the arms (those who can afford it and who have substantial assets) into the arms of the insurance companies. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the lifetime cap on care costs. It means the more wealth someone has, the more they are protected. I understand the logic behind it in that noone chooses ill-health and disability but the more than government spends on those who do have substantial assets, the less there is for those who cannot afford it and the higher the criteria to access support rises.

I just have a few queries which may be answered in the details. If Mrs Smith has a house worth £300,000 and she lives alone with no other substantial assets – say, for example, she has savings of £10,000 – is her house sold to release the asset worth up to the cap of £35,000 – assuming she doesn’t have an insurance policy? If she chooses to live in a care home which is private, but then the money runs out, will the local authority still move her? Will she ‘top up’ the local authority fees, paying above the ‘cap’ to do so? What is she lacks capacity and has no family?  I suspect all these answers are in the report but they will be questions I will be looking for.  The system of deferred payment is mentioned and I’ll hunt around for clarification.

The cap though, seems to be there to protect middle class votes.

I do, however wholly support the increase in the level of means-testing. I think it is entirely right to continue to means test up to £100,000 and I’d even go further than that. I don’t have a problem with mixed funding, I am just not entirely comfortable with the capping.

Again, the clarity of the coverage of those who ‘enter adulthood’ with care needs is entirely right. There is a necessary distinction between working age adults with care needs and older adults with care needs but quite rightly it is wrong to have a distinction fixed at a specific age. Indeed, Dilnot proposes that those who develop long term care needs before the age of 40 should continue to have a zero cap and costs should be met fully by the state. Above the age of 40 there will be some kind of tapering of the cap up to retirement age where the full proposed £35,000 cap would be reached.

Regarding the accessibility of universal disability benefits, Dilnot clarifies that he does not propose any reform that would lead to anyone losing their disability benefits and that attendance allowance will continue. I do wonder though how this ties in with the government plans to remove 20% of DLA claimants.

There are some recommendations though to change Attendance Allowance (AA). Firstly to change the name to something more understandable and an appreciation that many who are eligible for it do not claim it. That absolutely reflects my experience.  People who reach the cap when the government takes over payment will not continue to receive Attendance Allowance (or whatever it will be called) because the government is fully paying for their care needs – which makes sense to me.  The Personal Expenses Allowance (PEA) is proposed to continue – this is the payment that is made to people whose costs are met by the government in residential care and is currently about £23 pw – there is a suggestion that it should increase but not a recommendation.

The cap on hotel costs is excellent news in my view because I saw this as a potential ‘get out’ clause for residential homes. I do want to know how some of the private homes will adapt to these new systems though and what the cap will mean for overall quality of care provision.

The idea of clearer, portable assessments is a good one and long overdue. Eligibility criteria interpretation can differ wildly and there needs to be more transparency.   The minimum threshold would be applied at the ‘substantial’ level of care so I wonder how this portability will work for those who live in areas that meet lower levels at present.  It seems that there is some kind of recommendation to do away with FACS over the longer term.

Can’t be soon enough – a new assessment framework will be developed ‘with experts’. Please please please can front-line practitioners be involved in these developments – not just people who professionally develop policies and have never needed to use assessments in their lives. This is why we end up with unusable systems. There is also a way of building self-assessments into these new models. That’s the idea anyway.

The last recommendations about building awareness and improving quality of information seem to be sound all round. Nothing to argue about there.

I am interested in the recommendations as they relate to carers. As far as I am concerned, I want more than just an assessment for carers, I want the provision of more services. Supporting carers very well both financially and with practical and flexible support is probably the one aspect which can potentially save the government more money in the longer term than anything else – but more than that, it is an issue of ethics and morality. I know that doesn’t often come into government services but it’s something I feel very strongly about.

There is more commentary about the details of Dilnot in Community Care, the Guardian has extensive coverage (including an article I wrote before the details were known).

I also recommend Arbitrary Constant for links and discussion about Dilnot.

Related articles

• The Government must be bold on social care reform (ageukblog.org.uk)
• Report: ‘Cap The Price Of Old Age Care’ (news.sky.com)

Personal Budgets, Personalisation, Thoughts and Hopes

Yesterday Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) published the results of a National Personal Budget Survey.

The headline ‘results’ are of course overwhelmingly positive. Personal Budgets work. Direct Payments Are Good. Everyone is happy.

jrambow@flickr

Is any of this a surprise though? We know that people who can and are able to manage (or have family members to help them to manage) personal budgets delivered through direct payments (where money is paid directly to users) prefer them to less flexible local authority provided care packages – particularly when the scope of local authority care packages is limited to agencies with block contract arrangements.

In Control – which publishes the survey – highlights the following ‘implications’ from the findings. The bold is a direct quote and the italics are mine.

Other implications that can be drawn from the survey results include:

• Personal budgets work better for older people than you might expect and direct payments work just as well for older people as everyone else.

Who said we were not expecting personal budgets to work for older people? Does this make an ageist assumption and lump together all ‘older people’. Of COURSE they work as well for people who are 65 as they do for people who are 64 but what about people without capacity or who don’t have family or friends involved? What about a more subtle distinction between 65 year olds and 85 year olds rather than a blanket ‘old people’ response.

• The processes used for delivering personal budgets are more difficult than they need to be and that impacts badly on carers and on personal budget recipients.

Did this seriously need a survey over three months to discover? You could have asked me three years ago and I wouldn’t have charged consultancy fees.

• More work needs to be done to make direct payments more accessible generally but especially to older people.

This could have been written 6 years ago. We KNEW this from the roll-out of direct payments initially so why was NO WORK WHATSOEVER done around trying to work with more difficult to reach groups when personal budgets were being ‘piloted’. I really can say ‘I told you so’ as I begged our Personal Budgets roll-out team to allow us to pilot or be involved in the initial processes and they said our user group was ‘too complicated’. Heh.

• There is a need to simplify and clarify the rules and regulations surrounding personal budgets.

So those are the ‘implications’ and forgive me my cynicism. I love the idea of personalisation. I want it to work. I want to work in more creative ways or outsource my work if necessary to other third sector organisations but this is not ‘different’. This is not ‘new’. I fail to see the value of reports and surveys that tell us exactly what we already know again, and again and again instead of actively trying to work with people who actually understand and know what is happening ‘at the sharp end’ to try and work out ways to improve outcomes for those who are not receiving direct payments currently.

So back to the report – which used a Personal Budget Outcomes Evaluation Tool (POET)

in total, 1,114 personal budget holders  completed the POET survey, including 832 returns from the 10 local authority demonstrator sites and returns from at least 76 other local authorities. 417 of these personal budget holders also wrote in a comment about their experience of personal budgets.
In total, 950 carers completed the POET survey,including 782 returns from carers in the 10 local authority demonstrator sites and returns from at least 66 other local authorities. 434 of these carers also wrote in a comment about the impact of personal budgets on their own lives

And

Almost half of people responding to the survey were aged 65 years or more (43%); the social care needs of working age adults (aged 16-64 years) were largely split between learning disabilities (17%), mental health needs (8%) and physical disabilities (25%).

I don’t want to play too many games with statistics but it would be interesting to know what proportion of people who meet the FACS criteria in total are over 65 and whether 43% is a proportionate figure in relation to total recipients of social care services. I think as well, to class ‘older adults’ as ‘over 65s’ is a little disingenuous although I know it is done because that is the basis on which statistics are given but it shows some of the ways that systems restrict and inhibit knowledge. It would be far more interesting to know the differences of take up of personal budgets between 65 year olds as opposed to 85 year olds for example.

And to some of the headline figures, that can catch the press attention – most people who receive personal budgets find there is a ‘positive effect’.

Looking through some of the figures, it seems that older people were much more likely to be receiving council managed budgets – you know, that ‘easy’ way of just switching around a bit of paperwork and making it look like there is now more ‘choice’ when in fact, the services and delivery is almost exactly as it was before the ‘change’.

As for the outcomes the report says

In terms of social care need groups, older adults tend to report less positive outcomes than other social care need groups in six out
of the 14 outcome domains

I find the report to be honest, a bit of a whitewash in itself. It is only accentuating the positives and like all discourse related to personalisation and personal budgets, seems to be going over all the same ground again and again.

People like choice, people like flexibility. Yes, and rabbits like to eat carrots. It doesn’t need a survey to tell me that. What action and money and research needs to be concentrated on is the HOW.

HOW is there going to be an improvement in service delivery to those who are marginalised in this process.

HOW are we going to wriggle out of the sham that is council-managed budgets while allowing those who need to have others to manage their budget and support their care to have the same access to quality care and personal assistants that those who are able to choose and decide have.

I’m rapidly coming round to the view that personal budget support planning needs to be moved out of the hands of local authorities who currently have no interest in the process except for meeting the government targets. Where is the innovation within local government for change? Sure there are people, and I hope to be able to count myself among them, who want to do a better job and provide a better service but the constraints of the type of job I am doing means that I can’t devote the time necessary to truly inclusive and supportive care planning so Mr G whose support plan I am writing up (he doesn’t want to be involved in the process as he ‘doesn’t like forms’ and can generally only tolerate conversations with people for between 5-10 mins maximum and that’s only if he’s known you for at least a year) does get a rushed service because I have to carry out Best Interests Assessments, do Mental Health Act Assessments,  complete reviews and CPAs, liaise with other professionals, arrange discharges from hospital for other people. Yes, it’s a little bit of wallowing in self-pity and I wholly accept that. We are all busy but local authorities have no idea if they want a quality support plan without changing the ways of working in any other respect. Where is the time to devote to Mr G’s creative support plan? Oh, well, we’ll just do a regular care plan and a managed budget. Should it be that way? How has the march towards personalisation helped people like Mr G? Mr G wouldn’t complete a survey about a personal budget even if he did get a letter. Letters worry him and he doesn’t have a phone. I don’t want the Mr G’s that I work with to be forgotten in the rush towards direct payments.

When I first attended training we were told that any additional time we might be spending in our day to day work on these awful process-driven systems would be made up by the amount of time we would save by people completing their own support plans and assessments without any assistance. That may work for some people and I hope it does but for most of the people in the team in which I work it is unfeasible due to the amount of people I work with who have high support needs and who don’t have the capacity to make decisions about their own care needs.

The survey angered me, in a way that is probably irrational. Partly because it seemed to have taught us nothing at all. And partly because again, I see no new thoughts and ideas about developing systems that will be truly inclusive.

HOW can social care improve for everyone. That’s everyone. Even those who don’t want direct payments. Even those who don’t have advocates. Even those who are self-funding their own care packages as the criteria for receiving government support rise higher.

Those are the questions I want Think Local Act Personal to answer.

I have my own ideas. I think there will be a movement to roles for professional ‘support plan advisors’ who aren’t necessarily based in the local authority – perhaps individual social work consultancies but there has to be a separation between planning and delivery and the cost of these services shouldn’t need to be met out of the personal budget itself.

First and above all, there has to be a consistency and a transparency in the way resources are allocated and if necessary a weighting towards people who need assistance to access the same kinds of services who have been excluded from the process and the benefits in the past.

A survey of the skills-base of professionals who do implement support plans needs to be undertaken to establish what is needed and what is important to have.

Maybe it is a professional type qualification or maybe not. There is not much discussion about what the role of the social worker should be in the process. Should we be the ones support planning? I think there’s a argument that a social worker is well-placed to look at building plans together in conjunction with a user and family member if necessary and setting up things like trust funds or managed local authority budgets but only if the social worker is removed from the local authority talons.  Maybe some kind of team of people with different kinds of experience and expertise working together with some background and training in non-directive advocacy for people who do lack the capacity to organise their own support plans. Perhaps the social worker or support worker in these new roles could have longer term relationships with the users and carers and wouldn’t feel so pressured by management if freed from the local authority reins.

But who is going to suggest and discuss the new ideas? Where do they go? Who will collate them?

While I see lots of discussions around me about personalisation, I see little that says anything other than it HAS to work because it is best for ‘people’.

I genuinely believe that is has potential to deliver a much better system but and this is a big but, there has to be more creativity and different kind of research that looks at new models and methods of delivery and consults people – yes, like me – who while being critical really really do want things to work better.

My criticism isn’t because I want to bury my head in the sand and ‘retain the reins of control’. I really don’t. I want to relinquish control but I want more than anything an equitable system that doesn’t fob off ‘more difficult’ service users with a second class service.

Related articles

• Personal view of personal budgets (fightingmonsters.wordpress.com)
• Should private companies be looking after the elderly? (telegraph.co.uk)

The Hardest Hit Campaign

The ‘Hardest Hit’ Campaign is has been organised by a number of disability charities which form the heart of the UK Disabled People’s Council which is an umbrella group for many organisations across the country and Disability Benefits Consortium which is another umbrella type body which includes a lot of well known major UK charities and organisations.

Between them, these two bodies substantial weight and experience of disability in the UK and the campaign which has organised a march tomorrow, is intended to highlight the cuts which are being focused on people with disabilities by the government.

Tomorrow, 11th May, there will be a march in London. The details of the march can be found here and will culminate in a lobby of Parliament between 1.30pm and 5.30pm. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend myself due to work, however, in  the spirit of inclusiveness there is a joint online campaign for those who are not able to attend. There is both an option to write to your own MP (if you are in the UK!) and/or to send a testament to the campaign so that experiences, worries and issues can be collated.  It is worth reading through some of the testimonies already sent in.

So what changes are being proposed? Why is disability targeted?

Well,  as the Hardest Hit website states, the government (and let’s not forget that the Labour Party are also backing these changes) proposes

-  Cutting 20% from the budget for Disability Living Allowance (DLA)

Putting a percentage figure of cuts necessary only means one thing. It means raising the bar to access DLA. It is not an ‘easy’ benefit to apply for. I know because I’ve filled in many many DLA and Attendance Allowance (the equivalent benefit for over 65s) forms in my time. There are many faults with the system of DLA at the moment but being too lenient isn’t one of them. My own criticism would be about the way that applications are made and the emphasis on physical ‘ability’ and ‘disability’. I genuinely think that more trust should be placed in GPs and teams that are working with the claimants rather than form filling.  It’s important to remember that DLA helps disabled people to WORK.

Disability Living Allowance is also a ‘gateway’ allowance for Carers Allowance. Carers’ can only claim Carers’ Allowance when the person that they care for receives either DLA or Attendance Allowance so a cut would have a substantial effect on carers as well – even though carers’ allowance is pitifully low, it is better than nothing.

- Taking mobility payments away from disabled people living in residential care and children going to residential schools

I think the government may well be backing away from this one already. Campaigns and demonstrations can work.

- Cutting off payments of contributory Employment and Support Allowance after a year to people struggling to get back into work due to disability or serious illness.

This, I think, will have a massive effect as well as ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) is the benefit that is paid when someone cannot work due to ill health or disability. There are so many issues regarding ESA but this one is likely to cause substantial hardship and limiting contributory payments for a year when the effects of the illness or disability are not time-limited will merely serve to reduce payments to those who do not meet the criteria for the income related ESA.

Remember, contributions based means that the person has worked and paid their National Insurance – this is not a ‘layabout charter’ that the government (and opposition) seem to think that ‘hardworking people’ imagine is in place for ‘scroungers’.

Our system should support people who are not able to work due to sickness and disability. I don’t doubt there are problems in the system but I don’t see how employing a private company (ATOS) to make perfunctory tests based on predominantly physical health needs rather than asking GPs and consultants to validate (or not) the claims of their own patients makes sense.

On the one hand the government is saying how trustworthy and fine our GPs are and how they can carry the ‘commissioning’ task as they know their community best but on the other hand they are not trusting GPs to make honest assessments of their patients’ ability to work or not as regards assessments for ESA.

So as for the campaign, I want it to succeed or at least to change some of the distasteful discourse that exists at the moment around benefits and people who rely on them more broadly.

In order for it to succeed, it needs widespread support and the people marching need to know that they are supported.

If you aren’t able to attend tomorrow, go to the website and see what you can do to lend support.  Anyone who has a belief in social justice needs to be involved in building a fairer society for everyone. That’s what social work is about as I see it.

Related articles

• Thousands to march through London in protest over cuts to disability benefits (guardian.co.uk)
• Making Work Pay – Thoughts on the Welfare Reform Bill (fightingmonsters.wordpress.com)

Eligibility, Birmingham and Cuts

Image via Wikipedia

While awaiting the details of the court judgement, there was an important ruling yesterday that Birmingham Council’s attempt to limit eligibility to social care services to those who have ‘critical’ care needs is unlawful.

Drawing out some of the definitions to what this actually means and could mean requires a look at the details of those who brought the case to court.

There were four defendents which the BBC explains include

a 65-year-old woman with severe learning difficulties who receives 24-hour care in a home paid for by the council

25-year-old man with a rare genetic disorder and severe learning disabilities who receives overnight respite care, also funded by the council

30-year-old deaf, autistic man with severe learning disabilities who is prone to self-harm. His specialist day care would also have gone under the plans

and

a 36-year-old woman with severe learning difficulties whose day care centre will close and who is also set to lose respite care

It’s useful to go back to the definitions of what ‘critical’ and ‘substantial’ needs are to understand fully the implications of councils moving the eligibility criteria from one stage to the next.

Critical needs exist where -

• life is, or will be, threatened; and/or
• significant health problems have developed or will develop; and/or
• there is, or will be, little or no choice and control over vital aspects of the immediate environment; and/or
• serious abuse or neglect has occurred or will occur; and/or
• there is, or will be, an inability to carry out vital personal care or domestic routines; and/or
• vital involvement in work, education or learning cannot or will not be sustained; and/or
• vital social support systems and relationships cannot or will not be sustained; and/or
• vital family and other social roles and responsibilities cannot or will not be undertaken

Whereas Substantial needs (those that Birmingham are stating they are no longer able to meet) exist where -

• there is, or will be, only partial choice and control over the immediate environment; and/or
• abuse or neglect has occurred or will occur; and/or
• there is, or will be, an inability to carry out the majority of personal care or domestic routines;
and/or
• involvement in many aspects of work, education or learning cannot or will not be sustained;
and/or
• the majority of social support systems and relationships cannot or will not be sustained; and/or
• the majority of family and other social roles and responsibilities cannot or will not be undertaken

A couple of things to be noted here. A differentiation is made between ‘abuse’ and ‘serious abuse’ so that one will be covered and the other won’t. What kind of ‘legal’ test would there be to determine when abuse counts as ‘serious’ or not? Can we see children in similar cirumstances being subject to a differentiation of level of care available depending on whether abuse is ‘serious’ or ‘not serious’? And who is doing the judging? Well, I can answer that last question. It is the social worker involved as I am asked as a matter of course to ‘band’ people according to these criteria.

The obvious glaring point is the lack of thought of any kind of preventative work that sticking so closely to the criteria will create. Where is the hope of creating those very creative personal budgets when only the very bare minimum of essential needs are being met.

I can’t claim anything other than relief that Birmingham case was challenged in court. These criteria and these levels of need look at people as lists of what they cannot do. That goes against everything that we know and the ways in which we practice by looking at strengths and looking at people as individuals. However, the reason the criteria were brought in in the first place was to end some of the ‘postcode lottery’ of care provisions and to bring consistency to who was offered what nationally. Of course, the problem remained that interpretations of these criteria vary so the consistency which is objected by ticking boxes (the only way the officials seem to know to apply it) depends, as mentioned previously on the social worker who is doing the ‘judging’.

Back to this case though, it was brought under the Disability Discrimination Act and hopefully the judgement will be available soon. Hopefully too, local authorities around the country will be leafing through it and realising that the wholesale and slapdash cuts that they are imposing are not legal.

As for the government of millionaires, none of them will be reliant on social care support from the council. They can buy in any support that they might potentially need and cannot understand the distress of those who are totally reliant on the availability of services.  They cannot understand the implication of their gung-ho ideological cuts and the thought of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne claiming ‘We’re all in this together’ sticks painfully in the throat.

Although I fully expect Birmingham to challenge this ruling, I hope that the case is held and that some of the trigger happy cutting is stopped and the very real effect of the cuts agenda is shouted out more loudly and more clearly – not just for those of us who are personally losing services but to raise our voices with those who cannot always shout so loudly.

That is what social justice is about and that is what social working is about.

Related Articles

• Limits to social care ‘unlawful’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Councils slashing free adult social care (guardian.co.uk)
• British Courts Rule For Disabled Care (lezgetreal.com)

Negligence and Care – Kersal Mount Care Home

A nursing home in Sheffield, Kersal Mount, yesterday admitted it was negligent in the treatment of a Doreen Betts, 78,  who was left to suffer with with pressure sores for three months and who eventually died of an infection caused by those same pressure sores.  Mrs Betts died in May 2009. Her GP had recommended that the home refer her to a specialist to manage those pressure sores three months previously. They didn’t.

It’s a horrific abuse.  The inquest found that she would not have died had she not had the pressure sores. Pressure sores are preventable and treatable.

I decided to have a look at the CQC report from this period which would have been between March and May 2009 and sure enough, it is here.

The Home has changed its name though and is now called ‘The Laurels and the Limes Care Home’.

The inspection that the 2009 report refers to took place in August 2009 so it would have been a few months after Doreen Betts’ death for which the home have accepted responsibility. It received a ‘two star good service’ which in some ways goes to show the flaws in the inspection systems and which, incidently, the home still proudly mention on their website – failing to note that all the star systems are now out of date and are not being updating so it will, forever be a two star ‘good’ home.

Among the report there is a note that four safeguarding issues were raised of which two resulted in there being a shortfall in the standard of care that should be expected and one member of staff was dismissed as a result of this. This is a good home, remember and these homes regulate themselves and report themselves to the CQC.

One area that the home only reached an ‘adequate’ standard was in staffing where there were periods when the home was understaffed. Unsurprising as staffing is one of the higher costs. Still, the report says it’s a ‘good’ home.

I find it hard to understand how a report can fail to make explicit reference to the death of a resident under the circumstances noted above after three months of distress in the next inspection just a few months later but for me, that explains very clearly the problem with the inspection regimes. They are very much box ticking exercises and the reports use language which can seem over positive without being clearer about the problems that exist in a care setting.

How can families be expected to make a fully informed decision about the best placement for their family member when the reports are so sanitised.

Words are fudged and hidden away in terms such as ‘safeguarding issues’ when one of those issues is actually the death of a resident.

It’s interesting that Kersal Mount was registered as a new service in March 2009 and by 2010 it had changed its name to The Laurels and The Limes Care Home. To be fair, the 2010 report is better than the 2009 one and it seems that any issues addressed have been handled but it goes to show that the inspection reports rarely tell the full story. Ideally, I’d want to look at reports for the service before 2009 but they could be anywhere due to the changes in registration.

It does show the importance that frequent, regular, spot checks can make in identifying poor practice and although I feel like a broken record at times, as long as mistreatment of older adults in care homes sneaks onto the third page of the local free newspaper and isn’t addressed with the attention and horror that it deserves, we will continue to have to hunt around for details of these cases and the sadness is that they no longer surprise us.

Lansley, Nurses, Social Workers and Colleges

Yesterday, as a part of Lansley’s so-called ‘listening’ exercise, he found himself at the conference of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) as they voted in favour of a  motion of no confidence in him personally by a fairly substantial 99%.  Rather marvellously when you take into account the 13 abstentions, only 6 nurses voted against the motion of no confidence. As was mentioned on Twitter yesterday, it seemed to be a miracle that 6 were to be found.

You’d have thought that that was quite a strong message for Listening Lansley to have paid heed to but no, he wanted to give a perception of listening (as if the vote of no confidence wasn’t a strong enough message!).

He asked for 60 specially chosen RCN representatives to talk to him while he ‘listened’ for 90 minutes in a room to which press were not allowed.

Well, nothing wrong with listening of course. I shouldn’t scoff but I can’t help it amid Lansley’s gruff and graceless apologies. Why? Because the listening should have been done before the plans were announced. The listening should be done with a whole wide range of people who have an interest in the health service.

He has got it wrong  but he doesn’t seem to want to listen as much as try and persuade and regroup around his message of privatisation.

The message from the Royal College of Nursing was strong, and powerful and it has caught the news media. People listen to nurses when they say things are wrong.

But we can’t forget how wrong the government got when they brought these proposals to Parliament in the first place. What does it say about a government that has to do its consulting AFTER it has taken a Bill to Parliament that has been so strongly attacked on all sides by public and professional opinion. It doesn’t exactly make one comfortable that we are ‘in safe hands’ as they like to promise at election time.  Maybe it’s because all the consultations they did before the Bill was presented were with private companies and party donors.

This is a government which is struggling under the surface and has been caught out already on many occasions by acting without any idea of what the plans that they propose actually signify. It is when they try messing around with the health service that people sit up and shout back but what about the other measures that they have proposed like the changes in the welfare benefit systems which seem force degrading and inappropriate ‘tests’ to claimants to jump through hoops to get the money they ‘deserve’.  This is what we need to speak up against as well.

And one of my sadder moments yesterday, when I thought about the impact of the nurses and the fact that they are at least being listened to for press purposes, is how we, in social work, have been poorly served by the organisations that supposedly represent our interests.

We should look at the RCN and what they have done and the effect a vote of confidence had on the ridiculousness of Lansley’s ‘listening’ exercise when with an almost unanimous voice they have humiliated him. Where is the nearest equivalent social work voice?

Community Care reports that the Chief Executive claiming that ‘he simply doesn’t believe’  Unison’s figures of having 40,000 social work members.

Honestly, is that the best he can do in rousing his members? Is that the best we can do as social workers when we should be at the heart of opposing the government agenda to heap the cuts on those who have the least? We just get into squabbles between Unison and BASW about who has the most social work members? Who is going to ‘lead’ the College of Social Work? Are we going to have a ‘Chief Social Worker’? Surely better to have a broad members organisation that can speak for all social workers rather than split members into different ‘camps’.  As for me, I’m a member of Unison AND a member of BASW. Generally, I’ve seen value in both.  It isn’t about a competition about who has more members and some people like me would be counted twice in the figures.

More than anything we can see the importance of having a strong, national voice as a profession and as representatives of a social care sector that is being and has been ravaged by repeated governments. Perhaps a broader College of Social Care might not  have been a bad idea.

The stronger the body the louder the voice.

Of course, that isn’t going to happen. It looks like we will be left with a College that few social workers who are on the front line will be interested in because we don’t have time for the politics within the profession. We have too much to do and need to focus on the politics of the country before everything that we know and love about this society is lost.  So while the College or Colleges (depending) spend all their time and money rewriting competencies or capabilities or capacities again and again and again ad infinitum – some of us will just be getting on with doing the actual work.

But the shame of it is that a College of Social Work/Social Care could perhaps have been a voice to shout against the Welfare Benefit Bill and the ridiculous tests that are put in place to make decisions as to ‘eligibility’  in the same way that the nurses are a voice to shout against the health and (oh the irony) social care bill.

We should be more like the nurses. We need to be if we are to survive and have relevancy.  We need to be listened to as well.  But in order to be listened to, we need to build support up amongst ourselves rather than squabble like schoolchildren. That is the pity.

Related Articles

• Andrew Lansley receives vote of no confidence from Royal College of Nursing (telegraph.co.uk)
• Lansley says sorry to NHS workers (mirror.co.uk)
• Nurses ‘no confidence’ in Lansley (mirror.co.uk)
• Leading article: The health service needs evolution, not revolution (independent.co.uk)
• You: Nurses pass vote of no confidence in Lansley (guardian.co.uk)
• Nurses pass vote of no confidence in Lansley (independent.co.uk)