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DEVELOPMENT OF TOOLS TO MEASURE SERVICE USER AND CARER SATISFACTION WITH SINGLE SHARED ASSESSMENT
A Person Centred Toolkit
A Person Centred Approach
Best practice in the field of health and social care changes over time. A person centred approach to working with disadvantaged people has developed from a number of strands of thinking linked to:
The inclusion movement
The racial equality and other equality movements
The social model of disability
Improvements in practice in social work assessment
Individual planning
Normalisation
A person centred approach puts the individual at the centre of the planning or assessment process. It recognises that the individual is the prime authority on his/her life and that a dialogue with family, friends and service workers can develop this. Professional workers are recognised as being able to offer specialised help and advice in solving the issues identified by the person and those close to him/her: they are no longer experts on the person.
A person centred approach will work with people's gifts and talents rather than focus on fixing their deficits. It will favour individual and unique responses to a person's issues rather than a package of inflexible services. It will look for services which promote the person's involvement with people in the community rather than isolate them within services with only paid staff around them. It will recognise that services will need to change as the person changes, rather than assume that the service solution will last forever.
Practical manifestations of a Person Centred Approach within the Toolkit
1. Communication geared around an individual service user, rather than making assumptions based on categorising someone in a particular service user group
2. Recognition of the fact that users and carers are the experts who can best draw up standards for good assessments
3. An emphasis in the service user and carer guidelines for assessors about:
Setting the assessment meeting up in a way which recognises individuals' preferences
asking what is important to the service user and carer
asking about their wants, hopes and dreams
not seeing the person as a set of deficits
avoiding asking questions which are irrelevant to the individual being assessed
avoiding suggesting only service based solutions
4. Asking people at the end of their assessment about how they want to be consulted about their views of their assessment.
5. Framing evaluation questions around what service users and carers say is important.
The adoption of a person centred approach has benefits for people who use services, their families, staff who support them, organisations which provide services to them and communities which welcome them.
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