As Head of Service Modernisation for Glasgow’s Social Work Department Stephen Fitzpatrick sees real opportunities for Self Directed Support to help the council get ‘More For Less’ as it grapples with major budget reductions.
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Head of Service Modernisation, Glasgow City Council Social Work Services
Among the developments he can see coming down the line is an Amazon type website where service users can decide for themselves where they want to spend their personal budgets.
Stephen explained: “Self Directed Support essentially empowers service users as consumers and one of the challenges we face is making sure they are in a position to make informed choices.”
He revealed that Glasgow is already working with English local authorities to develop a user-led website where personal budget holders will be able to compare what service providers have to offer.
“Ideally someone would be able to go onto the site and see if others have had a good or bad experience with a particular service or provision.
“Service users would have the same experience as someone going onto Amazon to check out what other people have to say and what alternative goods or services they checked out or decided to buy.”
Stephen is adamant that introducing Self Directed Support is not a cost cutting exercise, but part of a strategy to use resources more efficiently to help cope with budget cuts of at least 12% over the next three years.
He said: “There is evidence from elsewhere that Self Directed Support can achieve efficiencies, and even with our very small numbers we have people who have not used all of their personal budgets.
“Individuals can sometimes be less risk adverse than social care staff and we also have some very high level and expensive services that people don’t necessarily need to achieve better outcomes.
“People also tend to have better ideas of what’s best for them.
“It might be as simple as someone saying: ‘I would rather play snooker with my pals sometimes, rather spend time in a day centre that costs five times as much as if you just gave me the money and a bit of support to go down the snooker hall.’
However Stephen is acutely aware that Self Directed Support is at a very early stage and while timescales are impossible to nail down he agrees with the general view that it will take around ten years to fully develop the concept.
He said: “In Glasgow we are starting now, and while we can’t say with any degree of certainty exactly where we will be in two or five years, we are looking for significant numbers, particularly among people with learning disabilities, to become involved over the next couple of years.
“Then we hope that things start to come together. The confidence building kicks in, word of mouth spreads the news of success stories, and the market starts to evolve and helps drive the process forward.
“We recognise things have to happen in sequence before we can reach big numbers but this year we hope to be heading towards three figures for the number of people with personal budgets or the equivalent.
“We are starting small and hoping for the snowball effect.”
Stephen added: “The change process we have to manage is hugely complex but the basic challenge is quite clear cut – can we make people’s lives better by changing the way we do things?
“I sincerely believe we can.”
