Getting Personal: measuring providers' progress towards personalisation

We have worked with the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group (VODG) to develop a tool to help you assess how ready you are to deliver personalised care services and direct you to resources that will help you make improvements. It will be of particular use to social care providers.

The tool is straightforward to use. It will take you through a series of questions under four section headings: Person, Team, Organisation and Market.

Click on the headings below to find out more.

  • Find out how Getting Personal can help you

    Getting Personal is for use by the whole adult social care sector. The tool:

    • Offers a quick-to-complete self-assessment of an organisation's progress towards personalisation
    • Is primarily aimed at the organisation's senior managers, but will also be valuable for staff at other levels of the organisation
    • Can be used by Boards and Directors for monitoring and planning progress
    • Has four sections, which have deliberately been kept short and simple and uses closed Y/N questions. These aim to help providers to assess their performance in relation to a limited set of key factors. The tool offers a ‘snap shot' of progress and does not aim to be fully comprehensive.
    • Is not intended to take the place of an independent audit, but will help providers to reflect on their own practice and progress
    • Allows providers to anonymously compare / benchmark their progress with others completing the questionnaire.
    • Supports learning and development by highlighting areas for further improvement.
    • Signposts providers to resources that will help with their specific requirements as highlighted by the questionnaire results.

  • What we mean by 'Personalisation'

    Personalisation means thinking about care and support services in an entirely different way. This means starting with the person as an individual with strengths, preferences and aspirations and putting them at the centre of the process of identifying their needs and making choices about how and when they are supported to live their lives. It requires a significant transformation of adult social care so that all systems, processes, staff and services are geared up to put people first.

    Providers of adult social care have a critical role to play in leading service transformation. Traditional approaches to service delivery have often meant that people have not received the right kind of support at the right time for their particular circumstances and aspirations. Providers should review the services they currently provide from the perspective of personalisation and be prepared to think radically about what support is currently offered, how it is delivered and what difference it makes to the lives of the people using the service, their families and carers.

    Personalisation for providers means:

    • Shaping services around the person and taking their needs and wishes as the starting point for developing models of provision. It means delivering care and support in a person-centred way and involving the person at all stages of the process, from planning to delivery, evaluation and feedback.
    • Recruitment, training and working practices should enable person-centred support and promote the principles of personalisation with staff responding creatively and flexibly to peoples’ individual needs.
    • Everyone in the organisation being clear about what personalisation means and committed to engendering a culture of person-centred working. There should be a clear, focused strategy for transformation involving all sections of the organisation and systems and processes should be developed to support personalised packages of support and purchasing arrangements.
    • Responding to a changing marketplace. Providers will need to build understanding of their local market, adapting and developing their services in response to shifting demands and anticipating likely trends for the future, including changing customer profiles and aspirations, funding sources and availability of other services.

Once you have completed the questions you will be given your score. This will be recorded so that you can come back in the future to repeat the questionnaire and measure your progress. Previous scores will be listed at the bottom of this page when you return. Your results are completely confidential. No-one will be able to access them apart from you. You will also be directed to resources to help you make improvements.

To enable us to record your scores, you will need to log in to your My SCIE account before using the tool. If you don't have one you can set up a My SCIE account - it only takes a few minutes.

Before you can use Getting Personal you must first register with SCIE's website.
If you are already registered with us, please login now. Otherwise, please register now.