Personalisation - a social care revolution

Here is my, almost coherent, report on a few of the things that were said.

The government personalisation programme manager Martin Routledge summed up personalisation as offering people "practical ways to live their lves rather than receive a service." He said it would move social care away from the "us and them" mentality of workers and service users.

But he pointed out that personal budgets were not a "silver bullet" for social care and should not "carry the weight of the challenges the social care system faces" such as funding and demographics.

He said introducing personalisation would be a "major change management task" which had been "scarily underestimated". The greatest barriers to change would be in the areas of mental health and older people, he suggested.

Interestingly, Routledge pointed out that one of the major challenges facing the sector will be dealing with the media's response to individual budgets, following a recent story in which a service user was reported as spending his budget on a football season ticket.

"The prize is enormous, therefore the struggle for me will be worth it," he concluded.

Consultant Melanie Henwood said; "we are on the brink of the most profound change in 60 years... we will be talking much less about care in the future and more about what people put together to live their lives."

She said questions still remained about whether there was enough money in the system but that was not the problem of personalisation, which was simply about what we do with available resources.

For the computer geeks among you, she likened personalisation to a "new operating system" for social care (maybe like a kind of Linux).

She said the capacity of the market to provide for people's wants would be an issue but rejected arguments that service users wouldn't want the hassle of individual budgets, saying there were ways to make it less hassle.

She said there was nothing wrong with the idea of someone spending their money going nightclubbing rather than sitting in a day centre.

We'll also be doing a podcast from the conference which should be on the site later today.