I met up with a Mick Taylor of Mutual Advantage on Tuesday, a really interesting man. He is running a project entitled Collaborative Self Managed Care Project, the essence of this is supporting people who have Direct Payment’s or any other source of Individual Budget to work together to set up clusters of little co-operatives to provide very local mutually owned domiciliary care agencies, these cooperatives involve people delivering and receiving services in an active partnership.
This project has a wealth of practical delivery experience, and what interested me was that because the agencies were very small (150 to 200 hours per week), the delivery processes were very simple. The clusters then shared processes and resources that required more scale.
I think user led services will be a useful part of sustainable, adaptable, citizen directed services, and this looks a very practical useful way of achieving this.
There was a Guardian article about one of the projects ‘Caring Support’ you can find the article by following the link to Quality Ingredients.
Hi Rick,
This sounds so interesting and exciting!
Talking about pooling of budgets, many professionals don’t seem to understand the full potential – but with support and help, it’s so great to see what can be achieved!
I will have a closer look at this, definately. There will be workshops in November for s/w’s (Julie Davies will take part in delivering it too), and this must be one of the possibilities of a DP that can be use as an example for the social workers.
DPs (used imaginatively) can truly be part of empowering our serviece users.
By: Mariann on August 26, 2009
at 11:36 am