As we explored Personalisation and Individual Budgets in more detail, we became increasingly aware of the need for a creative approach when working with people to help them find support in order to live the kind of life they wanted to lead.
For years, many people have become accustomed to receiving whatever services were available, whilst social care professionals have grown used to offering what the system was able to provide. We recognised, as others have too, that for this situation to change a different approach would be required.
With this in mind we put together a Creative Support Planning workshop. Our aim was to help people to understand the current process for getting an Individual Budget, and to then explore where there may be opportunities to help people choose services that better meet their needs.
We didn’t pretend to have easy answers, but we started from the premise that “answers” will come from people coming together, with the person who requires support, to think creatively about how people’s needs could be met.
We ran this workshop twice due to popular demand. The workshops were very well received, and people came up with some excellent options for services, many of which were based on existing services delivered by third sector organisations.
We invited social workers to the first workshop as we recognised that they had a key role in improving the support planning process. We also worked with Bradford Alliance on Community Care to invite Adult Social Care service users to the workshop. However, in practice, we struggled to attract people and only one service user came.
We believe that these workshops helped to demonstrate how a more creative approach to support planning could help more people to access services which make a real difference to their lives. We also think that such an approach could encourage the development of innovative new services, in line with the Bradford Market Position Statement.
It makes sense to develop this approach further, with greater involvement from potential recipients of Individual Budgets, their circles of support, social workers and third sector organisations.
We think that further work in this area will also feed into other innovative pieces of work, such as pooling of budgets and development of packages of services.
