By Paul Lloyd
The government's plans for self-directed care will reduce checks on elder abuse to dangerously low levels, yet be more intrusive
Separating the care management role from the adult protection role, as envisaged in the Department of Health's Transforming Social Care (2008), could have serious repercussions for elder abuse.
The government's plans for self-directed care will reduce checks on elder abuse to dangerously low levels, yet be more intrusive
Separating the care management role from the adult protection role, as envisaged in the Department of Health's Transforming Social Care (2008), could have serious repercussions for elder abuse.
Checks carried out by home care services and respite care provided to defuse tensions in the home, help to uncover abusive situations. Self-directed care will sever this link and free the client from the gaze of the state. For the majority that may not be problematic but for the minority it might.
If direct payments procedures are anything to go by, the annual review of self-directed funding will be a cursory affair, perhaps reduced to a phone call. In the words of Demos associate and government adviser Charles Leadbeater, this is light touch monitoring.
Under the plans, the social worker may only gain access to the home of a client when other services suspect something untoward is taking place. The collaborative and supportive role of the engaged social worker in a known case will be replaced by the intrusive, intermittent, intervention of the adult protection investigator. The state will strengthen the policing role of social work with all the inherent pitfalls that contains.
Moreover, local authority and independent sector agency in-built checks and monitoring of home carers may be a casualty as service users are forced to navigate the care market themselves. Social workers are also familiar with the competing agendas of the carer and the cared for and the potential for conflict. Self-directed support could see the elimination of their mediating role.
Current child protection practice, as far as I understand it, seeks to re-establish the same collaborative approach that self-directed care is in the process of dismantling. For those clients and families on the receiving end of this new intervention there will undoubtedly be a marked change in the approach of the social worker.
The benign state will have become that little bit more authoritarian, and with the expected proliferation of financial abuse the number of people who will be investigated will surely grow.
Too often the debate around self-directed care is premised on the needs of the most vocal individuals and organisations that champion user autonomy; there is a clear danger that these will drown out those of people who are suffering abuse.
Paul Lloyd is a social worker in Cumbria
If direct payments procedures are anything to go by, the annual review of self-directed funding will be a cursory affair, perhaps reduced to a phone call. In the words of Demos associate and government adviser Charles Leadbeater, this is light touch monitoring.
Under the plans, the social worker may only gain access to the home of a client when other services suspect something untoward is taking place. The collaborative and supportive role of the engaged social worker in a known case will be replaced by the intrusive, intermittent, intervention of the adult protection investigator. The state will strengthen the policing role of social work with all the inherent pitfalls that contains.
Moreover, local authority and independent sector agency in-built checks and monitoring of home carers may be a casualty as service users are forced to navigate the care market themselves. Social workers are also familiar with the competing agendas of the carer and the cared for and the potential for conflict. Self-directed support could see the elimination of their mediating role.
Current child protection practice, as far as I understand it, seeks to re-establish the same collaborative approach that self-directed care is in the process of dismantling. For those clients and families on the receiving end of this new intervention there will undoubtedly be a marked change in the approach of the social worker.
The benign state will have become that little bit more authoritarian, and with the expected proliferation of financial abuse the number of people who will be investigated will surely grow.
Too often the debate around self-directed care is premised on the needs of the most vocal individuals and organisations that champion user autonomy; there is a clear danger that these will drown out those of people who are suffering abuse.
Paul Lloyd is a social worker in Cumbria
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