Staying in Control - Health
Staying in Control is a learning community of 25 Health and local authority members. These authorities are taking part in Staying in Control's second phase of work. Together, we are exploring how personalisation models developed in social care can best be amended and tested within the NHS.
In Control's Health work – Staying in Control – began early in 2008, predating Lord Darzi’s Health Report,
High Quality Care for All, published in the summer of 2008. This Report made the idea of piloting Personal Health Budgets the legitimate ‘business’ of the NHS. Staying in Control's initial work produced the first discussion paper on Self-Directed Support in Health,
Citizenship in Health. We now need to test out in practice how Self-Directed Support in Health can work best for people directly affected, professionals and communities.
In Control’s second phase of this work has 25 members who will be working collaboratively throughout 2010. While complementing the Department of Health’s Personal Health Budget pilot research, our work will be distinctive in its emphasis on six key issues:
1. The purpose of Self-Directed Support being to enable citizenship, and people having the best quality life they can.
Our aim is to improve the quality of:
- the conversation between people and health professionals
- decision-making and support/treatment planning and Health outcomes through shifting power and decision making closer to the person directly affected.
2. Our focus is on the whole person in their whole social context and aimed at enhancing 'real wealth', working with people’s strengths and skills as well as the needs they see as most important to them and which are most important for them.
3. Our programme will work with individuals and family members alongside professionals to put in place sustainable co-production and peer support, locally, regionally and nationally.
4. Our work will aim to make the context within which people are seeking to establish Self-Directed Support conducive to the process – for example, by working with a community focus as well as a creative service delivery focus; and through working to create tools to support providers and commissioners to shift power and control closer to people.
5. We will learn through doing and evaluate developments by gathering the views of individuals, family members and professionals.
6. In Control’s overall message is that we are determined to support people being seen as whole people, who may have a range of complex interacting needs but also, crucially, have a potential to contribute and creatively engage in change in ways which amaze and confound our traditional patterns of relating.