Council and democracy

Adult Care Services and the White Paper

The White Paper ‘Our Health, Our Care, Our Say: a new direction for community services’, which was published in March 2006, sets out the direction for the whole health and social care system for the next 10-15 years. This fits well with the work that Adult Care Services is already doing and it also provides a focus for developments over the next three years and beyond.

The aims of the White Paper with particular relevance to the Adult Care Services plan are:

Giving greater control, choice and voice to users and carers, which means

• A stronger emphasis on person-centred assessment and support for individuals
• Extending direct payments
• Piloting individual budgets

to give people greater freedom to choose the support they want to meet their needs.


Services in communities

• It will become the responsibility of directors of adult social services and directors of public health to assess strategic needs in order to plan for future services.
• There will be a strengthening of joint commissioning with primary care trusts to develop community-based preventative services to promote overall health and wellbeing as well as specialist services for people with long term needs (80% of these people are using social care services).
• There is a particular emphasis on tackling inequalities in accessing services.

Prevention

• There will be greater shared responsibility between health and social care to invest in prevention measures that can improve people’s wellbeing and prevent hospital admissions.

Supporting carers, which will involve:

• Establishing an information service / help line for carers
• Establishing short-term, home-based respite support for carers in crisis or emergency situations
• Allocating funding to train carers
• Encouraging councils and primary care trusts to nominate leads for carers’ services

Supporting people with long term conditions, which will involve:

• Ensuring all people with long term or complex needs have access to a case manager who can co-ordinate the services they need
• Establishing joint health and social care teams to support people with long term conditions and provide them with an integrated care plan by 2008

Developing the workforce

• Building up skills in social care and taking actions to address recruitment and retention problems
• Integrating NHS and local authority workforce planning by 2008