News (Commissioning)

explores how individually designed and led, community-based supports have worked to protect both people’s health and human rights.

‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice’. Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote is full of optimism, a sense that progress is inevitable. The notion that a hopeful future of greater equality, health and wellbeing is somehow preordained.

Covid-19 has shone a spotlight on issues that were known to exist but were not given prominent national focus. The implications of the pandemic, played out in the full glare of publicity, has cast a sharper light on issues of poverty, disability, minority ethnic communities and the unequal distribution of caring responsibilities.

An interview, following last night's Panorama Part 2 Crisis in Care, with Adult Social Care Commissioner Pip Cannons on the changes that are liberating the care and support now being offered in Somerset communities.

At an event hosted by Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the IHub in Edinburgh on Wednesday 25th April, Community Led Support (CLS) was showcased as one of several vibrant new approaches challenging the way Health and Social Care Partnerships procure services to care for and support people with eligible needs, as well as how they use their local budgets to create an environment in which community and voluntary organisations who offer complementary support or indeed, early intervention and prevention services, can flourish.

Guest Blog from Doreen Kelly, Director of Beyond Limits an organisation based in South West England that has piloted a tailored approach using Individual Health Budgets in the form of an Individual Service Fund that ensures a truly person centred approach to support.

The consultation on the draft service model, 'Supporting people with a learning disability and / or autism who have a mental health condition or display behaviour that challenges' (what a mouthful) is now over, and we will wait to see what emerges.

Payment by Results is a way of funding services based on what they achieve.

There has, quite rightly, been a lot of negative press and comment about the marketisation of the NHS and social care services, the failure of Hinchinbrooke Hospital being a particularly dismal recent example.

Three weeks ago, NDTi published its research findings into the cost effectiveness of employment supports for people with mental health problems and people with learning disabilities.