Search results for ‘Subject term:"learning disabilities"’ Sort:
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How responsive is your service?
- Author:
- DOWSON Steve
- Journal article citation:
- Community Living, 7(2), October 1993, pp.10-11.
- Publisher:
- Hexagon Publishing
Describes a framework for examining the responses of services to changing user needs and preferences.
Selling individual budgets, choice and control: local and global influences on UK social care policy for people with learning difficulties
- Authors:
- BOXALL Kathy, DOWSON Steve, BERESFORD Peter
- Journal article citation:
- Policy and Politics, 37(4), October 2009, pp.499-515.
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
The authors of this article examine the influence of a range of national and international actors and networks on UK learning disability policy over the last 30 years, with particular focus on the policy shift towards individualised support and personalisation. Policy changes and developments within the UK are considered in the context of similar developments internationally and the extent to which personalisation can be sustained in the face of the scale and economic rationality of global markets is questioned. The article covers moves from institution to community, the Valuing People white paper and Valuing People Now consultation document and person-centred planning, direct payments and individual budgets, the personalisation of social care, people with learning difficulties and the disabled people's movement, the origins of direct payments policy in North America, marketing individual budgets, and key actors and agendas in the UK. The authors conclude that robust systems of accountability need to be developed that offer protection for users of individual budgets, including moving funding and service brokerage elements from local councils to local organisations, funding service user organisations to offer support and advocacy to users, and allocating funding to organisations of service users to enable them to develop links with service user groups beyond the UK.
Not just about the money: reshaping social care for self-determination
- Author:
- DOWSON Steve
- Publisher:
- Community Living,|Emprise International Training and Consultancy
- Publication year:
- 2002
- Pagination:
- 48p.
- Place of publication:
- Bury St. Edmunds
Direct Payments should be regarded as the first step towards a system in which all the functions are allocated logically and clearly, avoiding conflicts of interest. Systems which follow this model, generically termed Individualised Funding (IF), already exist. Some fifty programmes are under way in several countries. Evaluations of these programmes are only now emerging, but reveal outcomes that are strikingly positive. Although the evidence is not, as yet, conclusive, there are also strong indications that a comprehensive IF system would be more effective in supporting selfdetermination, especially for people with learning difficulties, than the current Direct Payments provision. The development of Direct Payments into a comprehensive system of Individualised Funding would involve: permitting people who require support services, and wish to use IF, to develop and cost their own support plans, reflecting their own life aspirations ( this would replace community care assessment); creating a system in which the limitations of public funding are balanced against the requirements of the individual through a process of open negotiation between the person and the council, based on the plan prepared by the individual; providing funding to individuals who require assistance in developing their plan, so that they are able to purchase this help from a source that is independent of Social Services and service providers, and who is accountable solely to the disabled person; ensuring that help is available to people who receive IF in the administration of their funding, and, if required, in meeting the legal responsibilities as employer of personal assistants; encouraging the development of a market of support provider agencies who are willing and able to provide services tailored to the requirements of individual IF recipients; and authorising and funding an agency in each locality to regulate the supply of independent service brokers, and to provide an access point for people requiring brokerage services.