Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- one How we divide the world into community and asylum
- two How we create problems by trying to fix them
- three Why failure pays, but success costs
- four Risk aversion and risk indifference
- five The humanisation experiment
- six Shared Lives
- seven Designing a new national health and wellbeing service
- eight Delivering the national health and wellbeing service
- Can we escape?
- Notes
- References
- Index
three - Why failure pays, but success costs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- one How we divide the world into community and asylum
- two How we create problems by trying to fix them
- three Why failure pays, but success costs
- four Risk aversion and risk indifference
- five The humanisation experiment
- six Shared Lives
- seven Designing a new national health and wellbeing service
- eight Delivering the national health and wellbeing service
- Can we escape?
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Jen had left school and we were negotiating with adult's services for the first time. Life beyond school challenged the local council who had one fixed viewpoint: to save money in the short term, achieving survival and ticks in boxes without any consideration of long-term negative consequences. Jen has Down's Syndrome but also a career goal. Jen's dream has remained constant. She wants to share her passion for dance and get the world dancing. We had worked out a plan for her to house-share with a dancer friend via the Shared Lives route and Jen would continue her dance classes. The council's learning disability team leader barely listened when we went to meet him. He said our plan was very interesting but what Jen would actually get was a supported flat, five hours of support a week and a place at the local college. Presumably he already had those contracts in place and the money tied up in them, regardless of what Jen's dreams were.
(Sue Blackwell, co-founder with Jen Blackwell of DanceSyndrome Community Interest Company)The price of everything, the value of nothing
I suggested in the preceding chapter that the economics of service provision systems are incapable of financially rewarding prevention or recovery, despite these being the outcomes on which everyone in the system agrees as most desirable. Commissioners pay only for the maintenance of high levels of support and crisis. Why?
Public services are set up around specific areas of need: health, social support needs, housing, offender management, substance misuse. Where these are broad, services departmentalise. If you have multiple health conditions, as nearly 3 million of us will have by 2018 (Department of Health, 2012), you will be ‘under’ different hospital departments for each, with perhaps only your GP in a position to see them all and consider their interrelationship with each other and with you as a person, but too hard-pressed to do so in your ten-minute appointment.
Each part of the system focuses on the part of you that it is there to fix, and having fixed it, or failed to fix it, moves you on as swiftly as possible.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A New Health and Care SystemEscaping the Invisible Asylum, pp. 45 - 68Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018