Are you supporting disabled people to pool their personal budgets or are you part of a pooling project yourself – Disability Rights UK would like to support you so we all benefit!
User-driven commissioning (UDC) is a tried and tested approach to support, gather and translate the lived experience of people’s care pathways into metrics for contracting and/or procurement. It is a more formalised version of a previous programme by the same name which we launched with six sites in 2011. There is one aspect of this former work which we want to pick up again for a funded development and research project: pooling parts or whole personal budgets can be a hard and very rewarding way to make budgets go further and also have far greater impact on commissioning. Please get in touch if you are supporting disabled to pool their personal budgets or are part of a pooling project yourself - with Bernd.Sass@disabilityrightsuk.org
Disability Rights UK currently run UDC on four sites, including the Integrated Personalised Commissioning site Tower Hamlets. A UDC project on the co-procurement of a five-year CAMHS contract in Birmingham was recently completed. The UDC sites have had a number of positive outputs.
So what improvements can user-driven commissioning help bring about?
So far we have seen disabled people drive a far greater reflection of their (self-assessed) needs, aspirations, peer support and everyday solutions in refreshed specifications of services and support, tendering documents, contracts, mobilisation phase and annual contract variations. There has been a better shared sense of what it is important to achieve and how to go about it across patient cohorts and whole communities. The projects have shifted economies of scale away from block contracts and quality has been put on a more equal footing with price, leading to further productivity gains. The impact of user-driven commissioning is currently being assessed by a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).