What future for personalisation? 10 items for your reading list

Not for the first time personalisation stands at a crossroads. In the coming months, two key documents will come out charting a future course for the personalisation agenda:

• an action plan from a summit convened last year by care minister Norman Lamb on the issue, which is being drawn up by Think Local Act Personal, the sector coalition set up to embed personalisation in practice;
• a ‘refresh’ of the partnership agreement setting out TLAP’s priorities.

This is also the year in which personalisation makes significant inroads into the NHS: from April, everyone on continuing healthcare will have the right to request a personal health budget; from October, they will have the right to have one.

Because of this context, but also for many other reasons, a debate has been simmering on Twitter, blogs and other forums, both about the way forward for personalisation and what is wrong (often, very wrong) with the way it is currently being implemented.

There have been many good things published on the topic in recent weeks but here are a 10 pieces that strike me as raising particularly important issues that TLAP and others will have to take account of to take personalisation forward:

1. Personalisation – give up or move on by Martin Routledge, Alex Fox, Miro Griffiths and Vidhya Alakeson (In Control blog, 31 January);
2. Working together and learning from experience by Sandy Marks and Andrew Richardson (TLAP blog, 16 January);
3. The Personalisation Problem by Mark Neary (Love, Belief and Balls blog, 31 January);
4. Personalisation in Practice by @Ermintrude2 (Fighting Monsters blog, 8 February);
5. ‘If you don’t know your history you’re like a leaf that doesn’t know it’s part of a tree‘ by Jenny Morris (her blog, 29 January);
6. The increasing evidence of how self-directed support is failing to deliver personal budgets and personalisation by Colin Slasberg, Peter Beresford and Peter Schofield (Research, Policy and Planning, January 2014);
7. Personal budgets – what does this mean by The A Team (TLAP blog, 12 February 2014)
8. ‘Social work must reclaim personalisation’ by Ali Gardner (Community Care, 10 February);
9. A social work perspective: personalisation and mental health by Siobhan Martin (TLAP blog, 10 February);
10. Standing up for real personalisation by Rob Greig (TLAP blog, 11 December 2013).

We will of course keep you up to date with both the TLAP refresh and the action plan but these hopefully give you some food for thought ahead of their publication.