The implications for social services departments of the information task in the social care market
The new information task faced by social services departments (SSDs) implementing the 1990 community care policy is huge. This paper notes the breadth and complexity of the early guidance on the subject and then examines the nature of the task and the issues it raised in a shire county. Three aspects are delineated: mapping needs, mapping the market and monitoring expenditure. We found that the county experienced a culture shift in order to accommodate the new requirements, but had difficulty in timing the introduction of its information and information technology (IT) software systems. Change associated with one aspect of implementation had important knock-on effects in others. We highlight the danger of procedures becoming system-driven and of staff being overwhelmed by the call for information. We note that by the end of 1994 (the end of the research period) the county was facing what we have termed ‘second wave’ challenges. We conclude that implementing community care requires an indefinite investment in people and systems and that the process challenges are in danger of diverting attention away from user and carer experiences and from outcomes.
Planning for Life: Involving Adults with Learning Disabilities in Service Planning
Policies for people with learning disabilities, as in the case with other groups of service users, have increasingly emphasised the importance of their involvement in the planning of their own services, and at a more general level in the development of their local authority community care plan and commissioning strategies. This thesis seeks to begin to explore some of the difficulties that may arise in attempting to implement such a policy through a case study of practices in one inner London Borough. The study includes a number of important interrelated themes including: the complexities of communication, normalisation, the nature of choice, citizenship and free will, and asks does social policy reform provision or create unrealistic expectations and burdens for social service professionals and service users? It is essentially a study about communication and its impact on choice and social inclusion. Focusing on communication between professionals and service users, their carers and advocates, the field study investigates the Council’s strategic planning procedures in order to explore the relationship between service development and the preferences expressed by users. The findings are presented within a legislative framework, with particular interest paid to the government’s White Papers ‘Modernising Social Services, ’ ‘Valuing People, ’ and the Best Value initiative. The study combines an historical account of policy development, and investigates social policies that have attempted to bring about change, while also exposing the contradictions within and between them. Because of this there are many challenges attached to this enterprise, and as a consequence the study is inevitably on a small scale and the answers it produces are tentative. Nevertheless it provides an indication of the nature and scale of the difficulties which social services will have to overcome if they
Informatisation and New Public Management: an alternative agenda for Public Administration
Introduction The contemporary academic agenda of public administration has been both shaped and sustained by a new approach to administration captured conceptually by the term 'new public management' (NPM). However, whilst new public management has come to provide the dominant agenda an emergent paradigm for public administration a second academic theme has developed, largely outside the UK, around the concept of 'informatisation' in public services organisation (Frissen and Snellen, 1990). The term 'informatisation' is used in the recognition that public services organisations and thus the administrative apparatus of the state are becoming strategically and centrally dependent upon the changing flows of informational resources which are made possible by powerful combinations of information and communications technologies. As with NPM 'informatisation' leads to insights about organisational development, about new bureaucratic forms, about new styles and techniques of management, about new relationships with customers and new conceptions of performance. But, whereas the point of departure for NPM is 'management', the point of departure for informatisation is 'information' and its communication. Thus we can begin to perceive the juxtaposition of competing emergent paradigms in what Kuhn would have called our 'immature science' of public administration. In the UK to date informatisation has received scant treatment in the study of public administration. It has been bedevilled by an implicit assumption that it is a narrow, technical field, entirely contiguous with information and communication technology (ICT). Technological innovation, however, is not the core focus of informatisation, nor should it be. Whilst ICTs provide a platform upon which processes in public administration occur, it is the qualitative changes in the way information is captured, managed, conveyed and applied which provide the student of public administration with his or her meat and drink. To borrow from Stigler's seminal