Report: Supporting Personalisation: The Challenges in Translating the Expectations of National Policy

Social care policy is actively promoting integrated and personalised care. Local organisations are starting to re-engineer their business processes, review front line practice, develop new operational tools and revise their information systems to support and deliver these new approaches.

This article draws on a study undertaken in one local organisation as it began to implement its response to these expectations. It uses structuration theory to explore how the macro agendas described by policy and legislation are translated into local perspectives and then further refracted through the lens of operational practice, shaping the business tools which deliver the change.

The evidence suggests that there needs to be a better understanding of how the expectations of policy are interpreted – and potentially distorted – through their translation into local practice, and of the role that information and information services play in enabling, or disabling the delivery of those expectations at the front line.