Supporting choice? Older people and personal budgets

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Martin Stevens examines research into how councils are implementing personal budgets for older people and has important questions about supporting choice.

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Policy impacts on home care services for older people

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Mike Clark provides a timely commentary on research into the impact of personalisation on home care services for older people and finds inherent tensions between choice, competition and the desire for improving the relational aspects of direct care.

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QVC or CQC? How people make choices about social care

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Martin Webber takes on a systematic review about choice and decision-making in health and social care by people with disabilities and long term conditions and, among other things, finds relevant evidence for personalisation and inspection.

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Extra care housing vs nursing homes for disabled older people

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In her exploration of a Canadian study into extra care housing for older disabled people, Jo Moriatry gives a critical view of the research and offers some insights into what it means for the UK policy and practice context.

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Is self-directed support delivering personal budgets?

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In his very first blog for the Social Care Elf, Martin Stevens of King’s College London and chair of the Social Services Research Group, takes a critical look at some of the research and debate around self-directed support and personal budgets in adult social care.

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What do rights and choice in social care mean for people with learning disabilities?

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In his debut Social Care Elf blog, Mike Clark, of the NIHR School for Social Care Research, London School for Economics, reflects on a conceptual study looking at the human rights of people with learning disabilities in an era of ‘choice’.

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Scoping Review finds insufficient evidence on impact of personalisation in lives of people with learning disabilities

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Background Personalisation at its simplest is about starting with one person at the centre of any process concerned with responding to social care (and increasingly, health care) needs. SCIE have suggested that this will require ‘significant transformation’ of adult social care services, structures and processes, with implications for the role of social workers. The researchers [read the full story…]

Impoverished personal relationship found to be predictor of offending in adults with learning disabilities

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Criminology has used strain theory as a way of looking at how certain social structures within a society may produce pressure on citizens to commit crime, identifying strain as either structural, e.g. processed at the societal level ,or individual referring to difficulties experienced in moving towards satisfying needs There has been little attempt to use [read the full story…]

Post-ACS depression treatment more effective when led by patient preference

The role of patient choice was a critical component of this study

Patients who suffer from depression after acute coronary syndrome (ACS) may benefit from stepped treatment, which takes patient preference into account, a recent study suggests. Furthermore this course of action does not appear to result in a significant increase in healthcare costs. Crucially post-ACS depression has been associated with both an increased risk of ACS [read the full story…]