Personalisation may require the regulation of personal
assistants to ensure the protection of service users, a leading
expert told Community Care LIVE yesterday.
Social care consultant Melanie Henwood said the "post-Baby P
climate" had made practitioners and service users "terribly
sensitive about risk" in the move towards personalisation.
Regulate PAs to address risks
"We need to look at regulating the personal assistant market as
part of addressing risk," she told the session on personalisation,
while pointing to the importance of a "proportionate" response.
Personal assistants are people hired by direct payment or
personal budget users to support them.
Last month's adult social care workforce strategy revealed that
the General Social Care Council would consult shortly on options
for regulating personal assistants.
Strong social work support for mandatory
registration
A
Community Care survey of adult social
workers last year showed very strong support for mandatory
registration of PAs. However there are concerns in
government and among adult services directors that this would
limit choice for people using direct payments or personal
budgets.
Also addressing yesterday's Community Care LIVE
session, Peter Beresford, professor of social policy at Brunel
University and chair of service user organisation Shaping Our
Lives, warned of social workers being replaced by "malleable"
lower-qualified staff under personalisation.
There are a number of councils giving non-qualified staff
responsibility for assessing service users with lower level needs
as part of the implementation of personalisation.
Personalisation 'not end of social work'
However, Henwood argued that personalisation would not mean the
"end of social work," saying it presented "huge opportunities" for
the workforce, including new roles.
But she also acknowledged that many personal assistants lacked
information and skills development, making it difficult to
implement personalisation.
Beresford also highlighted the importance of getting service users
to shape the development of personalisation, warning that there was
a "growing gap" between policy and what was happening on the
ground.
He said he had written to the chair of the Social Work Task Force,
Moira Gibb, calling on her to invite contributions from adult care
service users, as she
has recently done for frontline social
workers.
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