Health and social care policY

Health and Social care policy

Health and social care policy

Introduction

The Valuing People policy is the first White Paper in thirty years since Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped (1971). The aim then was to close large institutions and to integrate people into the community (www.mind.org.uk). Valuing People aimed to transform the lives of adults and children with learning disabilities through a person-centred approach and to enable people to become empowered in order for them to be included in society. This policy is one in a series of policies that are an example of the political driver of change such as the White Paper, 'Our Health, Our Care, Our Say: A New Direction for Community Services (2006) that are aiming to transform social care and to give service users more choice and to make the system more personalised (Johnson & Williams, 2007, p12).

1. Rights

However, people with disabilities were also seen to be the main social drivers of this policy after years of fighting for equality and inclusion by groups such as People First, the United Kingdom's Disabled People's Council who campaigned for the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and they also work at an international level in partnership with the Disabled People's International group (www.ukdpc.co.uk).

The four principles of Valuing People are rights, inclusion, choice and independence. The Government's vision was that the uptake of direct payments would give people more choice in how they choose to live their lives. However, the uptake of direct payments since the introduction of the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act (1997) had been particularly slow, mainly due to a lack of awareness and people, including professionals, can be very wary of change and taking on the unknown. The government therefore introduced new legislation in 2003 to make it a duty for local authorities to offer direct payments (www.dh.gov.uk), but in 2006 figures reveal that out of a possible million people only around 46,000 had taken up direct payments (www.eastern.csip.org.uk) .

A pilot of Individual Budgets was then introduced for two years in 2005 to 13 local authorities. Individual Budgets is a system that brings resources together from different funding streams into a single sum that can be spent flexibly in accordance with their needs and preferences. Service users are free to choose to have the money as a direct payment or they can ask the local authority to provide services, or even use a mixture of both.

2. Independence

The main stakeholders from the implementation of Valuing People are people with learning disabilities themselves and their families/carers, as they were instrumental in pushing the government to push through with this policy. The government is obviously one of the main stakeholders and it could be argued that this was an economic driver of change. Latest figures from the Individual Budgets Pilot study revealed that the costs of people using budgets compared to commissioned services is not much different, but long-term, costs will be reduced as people become more independent and their support ...