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Building capacity to deliver personalised services
Introduction
Personalisation is driving the shape of all public services, with a growing public expectation that services will meet their needs, helping them achieve personal goals and aspirations. This may pose a particular challenge for social work, given the need also to manage growing demand and complexity as well as the need, to protect the public by taking measures to control people's liberty.
To be effective in meeting that challenge, social work services will need to engage the capacity of individuals, families and communities and to work in new ways with other parts of the public sector, focusing increasingly on prevention.
1 Services must be designed and delivered around the needs of people who use them their carers and communities
Services must be organised in ways that enable people to use them effectively, recognising the needs, strengths and aspirations of people and their families. In order to do this we need to:
- have simple, reliable and fair means of accessing services;
- make sure that assessment involves people, using self assessment, where appropriate, building on aspirations to produce clear actions;
- recognise unpaid carers as partners in the provision of care;
- make sure that people moving between different parts of the care system have smooth transitions;
- make sure that services are provided from premises that are fit for purpose; and
- test out the application of personalisation with different groups of people, then use the learning to change services.
2 Services must build individual, family and community capacity to meet their own needs
Managing growing demand means that we have to help people find solutions to their own problems through building on strengths, promoting resilience and developing informal support networks. We can do this through:
- working alongside regeneration and community development work to build the capacity of communities to support themselves;
- building the social economy and helping people gain self esteem through sport and cultural activity, preparing them to enter work;
- testing out different ways to develop the capacity of social work services;
- helping people with similar needs through group work approaches; and
- supporting the development of self help, volunteering and peer support.
3 Services must play an active part in a public sector wide approach to prevention and earlier intervention
While social work will always have a vital role in supporting people in crisis, we need to get much better at preventing crises and responding early to emerging problems. Without that, services are unlikely to cope with growing demand. To do this we need:
- long term investment in prevention and early intervention;
- joined up approaches to prevention that cross the public sector, in which social work plays a part with health, education, police and other services;
- prevention to be part of everyone's job across public, private and voluntary sectors; and
- services to identify people who are likely to develop problems and offer them help early to prevent crises.
4 Services must become part of a public sector wide approach to support vulnerable people and promote wellbeing
Social work services can't be effective without the active co-operation and partnership of other public services. We need to move beyond integration towards shared responsibility for people in need. To do this we need:
- effective community and corporate planning mechanisms in which social work services play a full role;
- harmonised service delivery boundaries to promote partnership working;
- to provide and commission services at the right level, national, regional or local, to make best use of skills and resources;
- an integrated policy framework that rationalises information, planning and funding streams; and
- simplified governance and funding arrangements to allow integrated services.
5 Services must recognise and effectively manage the mixed economy of care in the delivery of services
To meet future needs, we will need streamlined, flexible approaches to commissioning that recognise the knowledge and skills of providers and enable personalised delivery of services. To do this we will need:
- new commissioning models that allow for more flexible responses to people's needs;
- new approaches to strategic partnerships between public, private and voluntary sectors that make effective use of the knowledge and skills of all parties; and
- more effective joint working between everyone involved in the care of each individual, that uses all their knowledge and skills to reduce duplication of effort.
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