What is Personalisation?
Personalisation is a new way of disabled people getting support from their local council. This includes mental health service users, and a whole range of other impairment groups.
It is also sometimes referred to as ‘personal budgets’, ‘direct payments’ and/or ‘self directed support’.
In practice, what it means is that that you, the disabled person, are allocated a budget, based on your needs, and you will decide on how that money is spent. Obviously there are some rules, but the key principles that underpin this new system of funding are choice and control.
Remember that personalisation is still very new as a principle in social care overall, and in mental health in particular, but it is really exciting for us, because when it works well it can transform your life.
Training for success
| ‘The course made me open up my mind about various issues. The trainers really made us feel at ease and comfortable about getting a personal budget’ |
To help make personalisation a reality for mental health service users in Haringey, Equals Training developed a three day training module, based on comprehensive and intensive research of personal budget implementation and the principles which underpin these schemes.
The Aims are to:
- Establish what rights you have as a person who uses mental health services.
- Explore the different ways you can take greater control of your life by having a personal budget
- Understand the new personalisation process so that you are confident and feel safe about going forward with it
- Help you to reach a point where you can make the decisions about your personal budget confidently and at the end of the workshops, leave feeling ‘I can do this’
We ran three courses over 8 weeks that were focused on practical ways of developing personal budgets and linked to both the social model of disability and a well recognised and respected recovery model that service users could relate to.
All participants rated the course and its usefulness to them as ‘excellent‘ or ‘very good’ and the majority stated that they would definitely transfer their social care package to the personal budget option. They also felt much clearer and more confident about how personal budgets could support their recovery and enable them to move forward.
- ‘Enjoyable and positive experience…(the course) was very relevant to my current situation’
- ‘I found this course an eye opener. I feel able to start my personal budget today’
This is a great result. It shows that service users have the will and the ability to break with the safe patterns of old, to go with innovation and recognise the potential of the changes.
Training your staff and service users
If you are interested in talking to Equals about setting up this type of training, for both service users and staff, in your borough/County/area, please contact us:
nora.kirkwood@equalstraining.com
We are happy to discuss the ways in which we can help you.