Current Policy and Service User Intervention Strategies - Essay Example

Current policy and service user/carer intervention strategies affiliation Current policy and service user/carer intervention strategies Service user involvement is merely a procedure through which individuals are allowed to become genuine and active in describing the subjects of concern to them. Further, they come up with decisions about factors that upset their lives, in articulating policies, in planning, progressing, and providing services and implementing actions to accomplish change. The affirmative contribution service users can make to social care development, and planning is now known in the government policy. Referring to Robinson & Webber (2013), service users are taking a lively role in exertions to develop both social and health care services. Facilitating such a procedure, will regularly lead to proper services of greater quality with augmented user satisfaction and compliance. Nevertheless, the extent and level of operational service user contribution in improving and changing services is unreliable. This can be both improvement and change in immediate services and in the attitudes and cultures of the staff and agencies who provide those services. Furthermore, user participation in education, training, and research are also significant for service improvement and change. The word service user is used to consist of the individuals using the social and health care services as patients. Additionally, they can also be guardians, parents and carer. In addition, the term is used to denote to the communities and the organizations that symbolize the benefits of individuals. Lastly, it states that members of the community and public who are potential users of social care interventions and health care services. According to Biskin et al. (2012), current policies describing the procedures of how care should be implemented ensure that ethnicity, race, religion, sensory, sexuality, disability, culture, language, age, and impairment should not interfere with service delivery. The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) was formed by the government in the year 2001 to increase social care services for children and adults. This is achieved through noble practice and assisting to embed it in daily social care provision. SCIE works to improve the professionalism and skills of social care users through their user-friendly, targeted, and tailored resources. It also involves service users, providers, practitioners, policy makers, and carers in promoting and advancing noble practice in social care. Furthermore, SCIE circulates knowledge-based noble practice guide. Apart from its repetition in several nationwide policy and strategic documents, it is apparent that enhancing greater service user involvement will lead to advantages at national, community, and individual level. In the individual level, there will be an improved sense of self-worth and dignity, patient contentment with care, safer care, minimized level of complaints and better healthiness. It leads to an escalation in trust and patient staff relationship (Livingston 2004). The community level will experience services that react better to the requirements of the community, more inclusive and equitable services that assist to lecture social exclusion, and increased trust, among others. Also, empowerment of the patient exists and this leads to higher responsibility for care. In the national level, service plans and policies are targeted, appropriate, relevant, and informed. Additionally, there is increased public confidence and perception in the health services. Cost-effectiveness is encouraged by providing better service results. Lastly, a greater understanding of the connections between the lifestyle, health, and the conditions in which individuals live their lives (Cleary et al. 2006). The Health Science Education (HSE) started the service user’s involvement. The health service education created a National Strategy for service user involvement to make sure a consistent and systematic approach to service user involvement in the social and health services. It forms upon the present good practices in comprising service users all over the nation and combines consultation with key external and internal stakeholders at numerous stages of the implementation system. The HEC National agencies have been tasked with managing and leading the overall enactment of the strategy of service user/carer. Moreover, service career and user participation is the accountability of all staff. Nevertheless, no service must be termed competent except if they are meaningful and appropriately including their families, carers, and service users. Over the last 20 years, various key pieces of the statute have made service user participation a necessity in numerous aspects of the United Kingdom social and health services. The foremost of this statute was the 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act that carried out consultations with service users a statutory obligation for local authorities. Later on, there was increased necessity for lively service carer and user participation in service regulation and development set out in the governmental directives on superlative value for native authorities and the statute linked with the New-Labour public service transformation agenda. Furthermore, there are enduring discussions on the differences to be drawn amid the different levels and types of user participation. It varies in a range from consultation on a personal level comprising feedback about complaints, surveys, and services through participation in development and planning of services to user management and control of services (Molyneux & Irvine 2004). Differences have been recognized between the democratic and consumerist approaches and user-led and agency-led initiatives, both having allegations for control and power. Democratic initiatives focus mainly on the service users making and influencing decisions at strategic levels, whereas consumerist focuses more intently on asking individuals about the services they are given. Gradually, the idea of consulting individuals about agency-led proposals has been surpassed by the idea of progressing services in lively partnership with those using them. Nevertheless, this is not at all times translated into practice. Research studies indicate the requirement for a variety of models of participation, dependent on the level of action that contributors wish to commit. What is significant is that the choice is present, and the partnership or involvement is real. Therefore, different types of involvement might be appropriate for dissimilar parts of a scheme or at dissimilar stages in its progress. Additionally, the present-day policies and service user/carer intervention strategies bring about changes on the social model of disability and service user importance. Originally, the social model of disability was regarded by the disability program as an instrument for attaining insight in their condition. Moreover, the world disables the physically impaired individuals. The notion that the world is responsible for erecting barriers on the disabled and therefore restricting their activities and options, has been used by others who are disempowered by physical, cultural, and social structures to understand their situations. For instance, society frequently incapacitates the older individuals just because of their old and they assume they are incapable of carrying out particular activities and tasks. Therefore, the main aim of the user movement of the mental health service users is to reframe the negative social identity as strong and positive (Benbow 2012). The social model of disability has hence become important for the service user movement and the demand for independent citizenship and living rights. When the service users recognize involvement as lively citizenship, it goes far beyond their civil rights as users of social services to declare their broader rights as citizens and as individuals. Therefore, the service users may have a double personality as service consumers and as citizens to whom such services are accountable. Furthermore, there are clear preferences among individuals who use social care services for assistance and support to live independently, instead of care that indicates dependency. For particular individuals, mainly mental health service users, families, and older individuals, preventative support work is seen as crucial instead of crisis mediation. The service user movement is clear to supporting the right of the disadvantaged in the society to ensure they have equal access to the normal things of life. Research studies from the user movements indicate that for service delivery to be meaningful, positive change needs to be achieved during service delivery. Hence, it looks like where monitoring takes place, it is linked to involvement processes instead of outcomes. This implies that particular agencies might only be concentrating on the transitional aspects of how people experience the procedure, instead of merging this assessment with that of outcome and income. The actual effectiveness of these procedures to enhance user-led alteration and effect on service improvement remains mostly unproven. Service user needs feedback on how their participation has influenced the society. They do not need only to feel the alterations in their lives because of improvement of service or individual level but also need to get some feedback as an integral part of the involvement process. The Audit Commission states that the significance of change ends and begins with the consumers or users (Morgan & Jones 2009). The absence of feedback might lead to cynicism and frustration about the exercise of service user involvement along with a potential detachment from the processes completely. When there is minimal, or no feedback communicated, it can have a negative impact on the participants making them lack confidence and motivation. Additionally, native authorities have official complaints techniques intended to allow persons to implement some regulation on the quality of services. The main intention is to improve customer relations, prevent litigation or conflict, increase accountability and stimulate quality assurance. Possibly the information from the complaints feedback tool might be used as an indication of the quality of service and it also shows the areas for improvement and change. Nevertheless, Minogue & Girdlestone (2010), suggest that these procedures could not be operational to the benefit of the agency or the service user as complaints techniques may remain inaccessible or unknown to service users. According to the numerous studies, carried out one can conclude that marginalization from both appropriate participation and service processes do not arise due to sexuality, culture, and race. Living in the countryside or particular topographical areas could have a bearing on the omission from structures for involvement. The very old, and the very young, specifically those suffering from dementia, the travellers, and homeless, individuals in residential or institutional care, the disabled and those with addiction problems seldom have the opportunity to be heard or to influence service change. Additionally, it is also acclaimed that poverty should be deliberated as a significant overarching problem. Studies point out that poor individuals do not have the right of expression as no one asks them for their opinion, and whenever they are in the know, they are denied the opportunity to exercise it because of lack of self-confidence, support, resources, and respect for others. Nevertheless, in the present days, policies in place are trying to shape these issues of biasness to ensure equality in the society. Reference list Benbow, S.M., 2012. Patient and carer participation in old age psychiatry in England. Part II: models of participation. International Psychogeriatrics, 24(02), pp.185–196. Biskin, S. et al., 2012. Reflections on Student, Service User and Carer Involvement in Social Work Research. Social Work Education, pp.1–16. Cleary, M., Freeman, A. & Walter, G., 2006. Carer participation in mental health service delivery. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 15(3), pp.189–194. Livingston, G., 2004. User and carer involvement in mental health training. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 10(2), pp.85–92. Minogue, V. & Girdlestone, J., 2010. Building capacity for service user and carer involvement in research: the implications and impact of best research for best health. International journal of health care quality assurance, 23(4), pp.422–435. Molyneux, J. & Irvine, J., 2004. Service user and carer involvement in social work training: a long and winding road? Social Work Education, 23(3), pp.293–308. Morgan, A. & Jones, D., 2009. Perceptions of service user and carer involvement in healthcare education and impact on students’ knowledge and practice: a literature review. Medical teacher, 31(2), pp.82–95. Robinson, K. & Webber, M., 2013. Models and effectiveness of service user and carer involvement in social work education: A literature review. British Journal of Social Work, 43(5), pp.925–944. Read More