Best days

Chris and Peter were matched together by Moray Shared Lives in Scotland. Chris is a retired farmer who wanted to give people the chance to benefit from visiting his land and the woodlands he has planted. He was approved by Shared Lives Moray to take on the Shared Lives role and then matched with Peter, who visits for day support twice a week. Peter has dementia and lives at home where he is cared for by his wife. The two four or five hour sessions a week with Chris give everyone time to re-charge their batteries and lead a life beyond giving and receiving care. You can see and hear the two men talk about their Shared Life here. 

 

The film was made after Peter had recently lost his ability to walk following an adverse

reaction to prescription drugs. The time that Chris has, combined with the opportunities he provides for walking regularly, helped Peter recover his ability to walk, which has enabled him to continue to live in his own home and community. Without the time and support given by Chris, Peter is likely to have been placed in a residential care home or provided with 24 hour paid carers in his own home. In both cases his life would have diminished significantly and the costs of caring for him would have risen sharply. 

 

Peter is not always as alert and lucid as on the day of filming. Everyone involved believes that the support from Chris brings Peter some of his best days.

Why we need the government to act on the Choice Review

With some of our partner organisations, we wrote an open letter last week to Care Minister Norman Lamb MP, urging him to act on the recent Cabinet Office review of choice in public services, which recommended that people should be free to spend personal budgets as they see fit so long as they meet broad outcomes, with the removal of ‘preferred provider lists’ and other traditional commissioning approaches which hamper start-ups, micro-enterprises and other innovators from competing with bigger, more established providers. There’s no point in having control of the money if there’s nothing new or different to buy with it. As reported in Community Care, we warned that without these ‘supply side’ reforms, the risk of personalisation failing in its own terms is high.

A great illustration of the problem is in this Guardian article about how council procurement processes left one social entrepreneur literally starving (at least around lunchtime!) due to their inabiility to renew a contract in a timely fashion. When the basics are so wrong, having an impressive virtual online marketplace for providers and a marketing programme to encourage people to take personal budgets will fall flat.

Our report on Ten ways to stop bashing -and start boosting – micro-enterprise shows how councils can learn from the best work of their peers and get this right, so that we can ‘Make Personalisation Real’, not just another box-ticking exercise.