The Personalisation Agenda
January 2010

As part of the Transforming Social Care Agenda, personalisation means thinking about care and support services in an entirely different way. The system will give people their own budget to purchase the services they need.

It means starting with the person as an individual with strengths, preferences and aspirations, and putting them at the centre of the process of identifying their needs and making choices about how and when they are supported to live their lives.

The traditional service-led approach has often meant that people have not received the right help at the right time and have been unable to shape the kind of support they need.

Personalisation is about giving people much more choice and control over their lives and goes well beyond simply giving personal budgets to people eligible for council funding. This will require a new way of working for the voluntary and community service provider organisations. It means ensuring that people have wider choice in how their needs are met and are able to access universal services such as transport, leisure and education, housing, health and opportunities for employment, regardless of age or disability.

In November 2009 the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) launched a new Transforming Social Care website to promote knowledge and share information on all aspects of social care including personalisation, individual budgets and new regulations for direct payments www.tasc.org.uk

Maria Tunmer, Health & Social Care Manager at KVA health@kva.org.uk