News

Topss England is half way through a three-year project testing out new roles and ways of working. Progressing through your career you will come across three types of new roles:

• "Hybrid roles" bring together roles with which we are already familiar. These not only crossover between health and social care, but also involve housing and education.
• "Ordinary life roles" bring principles important to social care practice into a variety of settings. As well as blurring existing professional boundaries some of these roles merge formal and informal care. Examples can be seen in the roles of community enablers and neighbourhood carers.
• "Genuinely new" roles that come out of challenges to existing arrangements by service users. Some of these involve users as providers, partners, educators and evaluators.

What difference do these make to you as a practitioner? Social care is changing dramatically and our pilot sites' experiences are evidence of this. Many of the pilots are trying to redraw boundaries between professions so that services become more cohesive. Issues raised by these new roles include:

• Impacts on career development pathways when roles fall between different professions - often pay, service conditions and the language and culture of the different professions vary enormously.
• The idea of the "professional allied to the community" as one way in which the distinctive strengths of social care approaches can be both transformed and retained.
• Developing systems that really involve service users at all levels, including as trainers and evaluators.

Practitioners need to keep up to date with new role thinking because they reflect service users' expressed needs, they are roles that demand skills prized by employers and represent opportunities to be at practice's cutting edge.

Vic Citarella, chair, new roles task and finish group, Topss England.