Changing the culture of social care in Scotland: Has a shift to personalization brought about transformative change?

Abstract

In April 2014, the Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013 (SDS Act) was implemented in Scotland. This marked a major shift in how social care is delivered and organized for both users and professionals across the country. Whilst it emerged through the personalization agenda-which has dominated international social care systems over recent years-self-directed support (SDS) represented a significant shift in thinking for service provision in Scotland. In this article, we review the initial stages of policy implementation. Drawing on two Freedom of Information requests from 2015 and 2016 and a series of interviews with local authority practitioners, we argue that, to date, SDS has yet to produce radical transformative change. We explore the reasons behind this through four key themes. First, we highlight the challenges of promoting the principles of co-production in policy and suggest that, in reality, this has been compromised through SDS implementation. Second, we suggest that SDS has been caught up in a policy overload and ultimately overshadowed by new legislation for health and social care integration. In looking at the impact of this relationship, our third theme questions the role of new partnership working. Lastly, we argue that the timing of SDS in a period of acute austerity in social care has resulted in disabled people being offered limited choice rather than increased opportunities for independent living. KEYWORDS independent living, personalization, Scotland, self-directed support, social careThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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“…The cash-based focus of the new scheme also draws strongly on the legacy of direct payments and personalisation which has influenced support for disabled people both in Scotland and across OECD countries (see Pearson 2000;Pearson, Watson, and Manji 2018). Whilst the global legacy of disability activism in securing this shift remains important (see Campbell and Oliver 1996), the infiltration of individualism and neo-liberalism in its implementation has been dominant and reflect many of the concerns outlined earlier by Furlong and Cartmel in regard to youth transitions.…”

Social enterprise, social innovation and self-directed care: lessons from Scotland

“…Personalisation policies across the UK home nations have challenged these social workers to work in new ways with reduced resources to ensure positive outcomes and maintain good practice whilst minimising risk (Stevens et al, 2018). In Scotland, the timing of the implementation of the Social Care Act has been challenging for social work, and when coupled with 'past trajectories' (Thelen, 1999), have added to the failure of the policy to generate transformative change in the social care market (Pearson et al, 2018).…”

“…The principles of empowering social care users to direct their own care which are inherent in the Social Care Act have been reported across Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA (e.g. Needham and Dickinson, 2018;Pearson et al, 2018;Power, 2014). Since the 1990s, policy makers in the UK have increased opportunities for social care users to have greater control over their own care.…”

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“…This leads to support workers being increasingly exploited and working without a living wage. As well as having negative consequences for workers, it also raises doubt about the quality of support they can provide (Pearson et al, 2018;Rummery, 2009;Rummery and Fine, 2012). Support workers can be treated in this way because what they do is not seen as particularly significant or important.…”