Need Social Care?

Risks

What are the risks for people using Adult Care Services?

How will these changes affect job security for Social Workers?

What are the risks for people using Adult Care Services?

Local authorities still have a duty to safeguard vulnerable adults and protect them from inappropriate risks.  However, part of the approach to personalisation is to ensure that people have the opportunity to live more fulfilling lives and is likely to mean more risk-taking than we have traditionally been used to in social care.

Risk enablement and management will be an integral part of support planning for individuals and will need to include an assessment of the capability of a person to manage their Individual Budget.

The Government has recognised that individuals may want to do things that the authority may have been reluctant to support in the past, so it has produced the document 'Independence, choice and risk: a guide to best practices in supported decision making  (279.19 KB)'.

The Resource Allocation System will also need to be carefully developed to ensure we do not run the risk of over- or under-allocating money to individuals for their Support Plans and thereby put the social care and/or council budgets at risk.

How will these changes affect job security for Social Workers?

The role of the social worker will probably be different to how it is now and some different skills may be needed.

Some authorities who are further ahead than Worcestershire are reporting that social workers are describing the new ways of working as a return to 'real social work' as they have more time to concentrate on supporting people with developing their plans rather than making applications for funding to their managers or negotiating placements with service providers.

It is still too early to early to say how adult social care work will change and what the new roles will be called.  However,social care will still need people who can identify people as eligible for services; pro-actively manage risks with these more vulnerable individuals; help with the production, monitoring and reviewing of Support Plans and support people to live active, productive, independent lives for as long as it is possible for them to do so.