personal budgets

Personal budgets are now a core part of social care and will be an increasingly significant part of the future of healthcare and education for many. We have moved on from their introduction in the Putting People First concordat in 2007 with an expectation that 30% of people would be using them by 2011 – to the Care Act requirement that all eligible people should hold one.

This research is from England carried out by In-Control to evidence the impact of personal budgets on those who use them and services.

Resource allocation systems based upon measures of need are one widely adopted approach to estimating the cost of the individual service user's care package in a manner directly proportionate to individual need.

However, some recent studies have questioned the feasibility and utility of such systems, arguing that the relationship between needs and costs cannot be modelled with sufficient accuracy to provide a useful guide to individual allocation. In contrast, this paper presents three studies demonstrating that this is possible.

The Social Policy Research Unit examined how current English adult social care practice balances the interests of service users and family carers, in assessment, planning, on-going management and reviews of personal budgets, particularly when budget-holders have cognitive or communication impairments.

The study examined senior local authority perspectives, everyday practice by frontline staff and experiences of service users and carers.

This short report is an evidence overview of key pieces of UK research between 2007 and 2012, which focused on the implementation and uptake of personal budgets and direct payments for older people (including those with dementia) in England. The report was published by the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) in January 2013. It is not a systematic research review or an exhaustive examination of published research on the topic.

Handbook for parents of disabled children and young people receiving personal budgets. ;It contains information, examples of good practice and links to useful documents.

Approaches to making personal budgets work well for older people (including people with dementia) emerged as a high priority and TLAP has committed to do more work in this area.

This report is a first stage. It draws on two key surveys:

1. The ADASS personalisation survey (2012)
2. The TLAP National Personal Budgets Survey (2011) and a review of relevant literature.

Discussion paper on why the underpinning notion of self directed support seems to have failed in its ambitions. It also looks at how the concepts of personalisation and personal budgets associated with self-directed support may retain value if interpreted in an appropriate way, delivered through an appropriate strategy.

Review that explores implementation of personalisation for carers, focusing specifically on personal budgets and direct payments in relation to support provided to carers. It reviews evidence on current implementation and identifies areas for further policy and practice development in view of proposed changes to the law in the draft Care and Support Bill.

It examines:

• What personalisation should mean for carers
• Assessment and eligibility
• Resource allocation
• Support planning and how personal budgets are spent

Paper that explores the links between recovery and personalisation and demonstrates how both are part of a common agenda for mental health system transformation.

Paper that shows how the personalisation agenda encourages innovation, offering the potential to create new markets around localised and individual needs, to focus fiscal resources directly and discretely, and to enable small groups of individuals to ‘positively disrupt’ a complex and opaque system.

It begins with a potted history of personalisation, and ends with five recommendations for the implementation of personalisation, whatever the sector, in a way that increases the availability and use of new, community­based approaches to support and inclusion.