Enabling risk and ensuring safety: self‐directed support and personal budgets
| Date | 17 June 2011 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14668201111160723 |
| Pages | 122-136 |
| Published date | 17 June 2011 |
| Author | Sarah Carr |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Sociology |
Research paper
Enabling risk and ensuring safety:
self-directed support and personal budgets
Sarah Carr
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to present a digest of the main discussion points and key findings from a
recent Social Care Institute for Excellence report on risk enablement and safeguarding in the context of
self-directed support and personal budgets.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores how the personalisation agenda and adult
safeguarding can work together in policy and practice and addresses some of the frontline concerns
about empowerment and duty of care.
Findings – Evidence on how self-directed support and personal budgets can be used to enable people
to take positive risks while staying safe and emerging practice is examined. It suggests that
person-centred working in adult safeguarding, along with the mechanism of self-directed support
planning and outcome review, cansupport the individual to identify the risks they want to take and those
they want to avoid in order to stay safe. It is clear that if frontline practitioners are overly occupied with
protecting organisations and individuals from financial abuse, this will impact on the capacity of those
practitioners exercising their duty of care at the front line. This means that practitioners are less able to
engage with individuals to identify safeguarding issues and enable positive risk taking. Defensive risk
management strategies or risk-averse frontline practice may then result in individuals not being
adequately supported to make choices and take control and, therefore, being put at risk. Practitioners
need to be supported by local authorities to incorporate safeguarding and risk enablement in their
relationship-based, person-centred working. Good quality, consistent and trusted relationships and
good communication are particularly important for self-directed support and personal budget schemes.
Originality/value – The use of ‘ ‘risk enablement panels’’ and ‘‘personalisation and safeguarding
frameworks’’ are two ways to address some of the issues in practice.
Keywords Personalisation, Self-directed support, Risk management, Independent living,
Personal budgets, Choice and control, Patient care, Financial risk
Paper type Research paper
The effective integration of safeguarding and personalisation contains the seeds for a
transformation of care, not just the prevention of abuse and neglect (Warin, 2010, p. 42).
Introduction
This paper presents a digest of the main discussion points and key findings from a recent
Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) report on risk enablement and safeguarding in the
context of self-directed support and personal budgets (Carr,2010b). The report is one of the
first evidence overviews on the topic and includes findings from the recent UK and
international literature as well as emerging directions from practice. The focus is on facilitating
evidence-informed policy making, good frontline practice and the promotion of choice,
control and independent living for people using services. The research identified covered
older people, people with physical or sensory disabilities, learning disabilities and mental
health problems. The report addresses some of the findings from SCIE Research Briefing 20:
PAGE 122
j
THE JOURNAL OF ADULT PROTECTION
j
VOL. 13 NO. 3 2011, pp. 122-136, QEmerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1466-8203 DOI 10.1108/14668201111160723
Sarah Carr is based at the
Social Care Institute for
Excellence (SCIE), London,
UK and is also an Honorary
Fellow at Staffordshire
University,
Stoke-on-Trent, UK.
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