Personalisation is bogging us down. Whatever happened to social work?

Our director of adult care on why the systems and processes overtaking principles and values make you want to cry

Anyone in adult social care who saw the Clare in the Community cartoon a couple of weeks ago will have laughed a lot and then wanted to cry at the honesty of it.

We are trying to live the dream of personalisation but we are in danger of the systems and processes overtaking the principles and values.

I am a director old enough to remember the new dawn of the Community Care Act in the early 90s, how it was going to change our relationships with users and carers, allow people to have real choice about their care, enabling them to stay living at home in their community.

Sound familiar? But what happened? We care managed people out of their own existence with complex assessment processes, eligibility criteria, means tests, funding panels and worries about keeping the private care market afloat.

And here we ago again with resource allocation systems, brokers, savings targets, performance indicators demanding a level of personal budgets within an artificial timeline, and worries that personalisation will put providers out of business.

Why? Because we are always trying to do too much with too little. We have rightly raised expectations that universal person-centred care empowers people to make the right choices but at the same time we are making unprecedented savings in adult social care budgets, reducing staffing levels, cutting grants to the voluntary sector and driving cost out of the care market.

Too depressing? There is a way out. Let’s try trusting our practitioners and the users they are working with to make the right decisions about the money they spend and the choices they make without tying them up in bureaucracy.

Complicated ways of matching needs with outcomes through scoring systems to arrive at a magical sum isn’t going to change someone’s life for the better.

Having open, honest conversations, drawing out someone’s confidence through building a relationship, working out what and who is important to them and prioritising how to spend what money they have on the things that are going to make them happy and fulfilled is what we should be doing, and I bet we will still make the money work.

I remember working like that when I was a practitioner – before personalisation and before the Community Care Act. It was called social work.

As a director now, I want us to get back to that – living by our values and our knowledge of what works with the people we serve, will lead us out of the wilderness that is local government today.

Pollyanna Perkins is a director of adult social care for a large local authority. It is not her real name