People Powered NHS: A Power to Create discussion paper

With the NHS now committed to Integrated Personal Commissioning, and other services looking urgently at how to make good on their aspirations to change from ‘done to’ to ‘done with’ services, what lessons should we take from personalisation to date?

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In this positive but clear-sighted essay, Alex Fox urges services and communities to maintain focus on the radical values underpinning personalisation, rather than become distracted by administrative and operational mechanisms.  New mechanisms superimposed on the old culture of deficit models and professional gift, will falter or fail.

This paper is part of a series of responses to what the RSA has called the Power to Create – our belief that living better lives together depends on un-tapping the power to create that lies within all of us.  The way in which state resources are currently disbursed misses an enormous creative opportunity.  For the Power to Create to flourish, power and resource will need to flow through the system very differently from how they do now, and personalisation, in its successes and frustrations, helps us start to see how that might happen.

Alex Fox FRSA is CEO of Shared Lives Plus, the UK network for Shared Lives carers and schemes, and Homeshare schemes.