Proud to be apart of this

Personalisation/Citizen Directed Support is putting the service users with their family and carer(s) back in the centre by self assessing or co-assessing holistically. It’s about the ethos that the individual/customer knows best, allowing/enabling people to shape and control their own services – thereby their life. It’s about putting more resources into prevention and reablement, making people part of their community and vice versa. Transparent allocation of resources to provide a full range of services, developing the marketplace, making choice real. Access and inclusion where citizens have equal rights and opportunities. It’s about supporting better health and social care outcomes by seeing images of possibilities by good support planning. Give staff and users guidelines permission to do it differently, not prescriptions.

I like these 5 principles of Citizen Directed Support, it is very clear. Coordination is interesting I am looking at an approach called Locality building in partnership with Time Banks Wales at the moment and will report back at our next meeting. I think some of the coordination may also come in the ‘sustainable’ outcomes commissioning where there are also outcomes about collaborative behaviour from providers.

Rick

First and as an aside, it’s nice to see the notion of citizen appearing more regularly now. One alternative is that we are ‘consumers’, which is sometimes illusory – since a lot of the stuff we are consuming is, in one degree or another, a choice that Hobson might have had access to. In the same vein, I also like the idea of mutually supportive groups, communities if you like. They offer a chance of individual expressions being beneficially amplified – often to the extent they become more than the sum of the parts.

As to your stab at a definition, I agree with it (save for a couple of minor changes) though for clarity it might benefit from unpicking into principles that we can say underpin the notion. They could be displayed something like this (still below the magic 100):

The five principles of Citizen Directed Support:

Individuals are supported to have control over the range of services they use, through a range of methods such as individual budgets or use led services.

They are equally helped to become part of mutually supportive communities which they have investment in and influence over.

Agencies deliver services to individuals achieving explicitly agreed individual outcomes.

They also actively support communities to build their capacity for collaboration and mutual assistance.

Explicit shared systems of communication exist between individuals, community groups and agencies to support collaborative decision making and local adaptation.

Beyond that, I’m interested in who might ultimately be responsible for orchestrating and maintaining the practice. I haven’t yet answered that to my satisfaction. If Citizen Directed Support were up and running in a locality, it maybe would have assumed a dynamic of its own (and that would have to be respected) but commissioners would perhaps still need to be the bankers of last resort.