Pilot reveals personalised support produces better results

Pilot schemes run by Family Mosaic find offering choice and control gives clients confidence to manage their own lives

Social housing tenants and residents receiving social care are able to make better choices about their own future when decision-making is handed over to them, results from a pilot project have revealed.

Family Mosaic, one of the largest housing associations in the south of England, has published the results of the six-month scheme which gave more residents more choice over the kind of services they recieved due physical and mental health problems, ageing, homelessness or other support needs. The project, named Let Me Choose, found residents responded better to personalised care.

The results revealed that clients wanted more choice and control over their support packages and that by handing over the decision-making, residents felt more confident and were able to make independent choices about their future more easily then they had done before.

Although staff had reservations about the scheme, incidents of violence or unruly behaviour, especially in the most volatile group, reduced to zero.

“The group we thought would be the most difficult was actually the most successful, that was the young people,” explained Yvonne Arrowsmith, group operations director at Family Mosaic.

“They can be quite hard to engage in new things because the majority of them come to us from difficult backgrounds – a lot of them are single homeless young people. We found that they loved being given control and the scheme, thinking about how they wanted the services, gave them the opportunity to tell us what didn’t work – which was the paperwork. They asked us “have you got a support plan?” because it’s not normal. It’s not something that everyone has. What they wanted was a “to do” list, it was about having a normal life.

“A few people did disengage to start with but very quickly they realised they needed the support and so when they came back they were much more engaged,” she added.

The pilot saw the housing association introduce a mix of core and additional support services, in place of the existing care programme residents were used to. Core services included assessment, reviews and healthcare but clients were also given a broad choice of other services and ways to access support.

One pilot programme trailled a Sky-TV type package, offering clients the choice of a range of “care bundles” to choose from, while another offered branded bank notes to buy support from staff for activities of their choice, which could include being accompanied to go for a haircut.

To make the scheme possible, local authorities agreed to loosen grant restrictions on Family Mosaic to allow them to provide a wider range of support. These restrictions have since been removed completely and one of the councils involved, Hammersmith & Fulham, is working with seven other authorities to make changes to the way it provides care for its own tenants.

Councillor Joe Carlebach, cabinet member for community care at Hammersmith & Fulham, said: “This successful pilot shows that residents really value and benefit from being able to choose to receive more practical, hands-on support to help reduce social isolation and build confidence. We welcome any opportunities that help our residents regain or maintain their independence and this pilot has given us a good insight into the benefits of offering more flexible, personalised floating support to residents across the borough.”

Arrowsmith said loosening grant restrictions was important for housing associations to deliver the type of care that made a difference to residents’ lives.

“It’s about the whole person, the client doesn’t care where the funding comes from, they just need what they need, people don’t split their needs into compartments,” she said. “Commissioners have talked about joint commissioning for years but they’re still quite restricted in that they allocate set funding to different places. That doesn’t work when you’re working with individuals. It hinders recovery too, opening up services allowed people to say “this is what I need and this is what would help me more”, because we were able to provide more, people did improve much quicker and outcomes were more positive then before.”

Family Mosaic now plans to use lessons learned from the pilot to make changes to the service it provides, including staffing changes in order to accommodate the less-specialised type of support that the pilot revealed users favour, which could bring costs down.