Alex Fox's Page

The chances are you’ve never heard of NAAPS UK, which for almost 20 years had been the national network for an equally under-appreciated form of social care which used to be known as Adult Placement (the ‘AP’ in NAAPS), but more recently as ‘Shared Lives’. (In Shared Lives, an adult in need of support is matched with a compatible registered Shared Lives carer, and they share family and community life, in relationships which…

Giving individuals the option to control the money which is spent on meeting their needs feels to me to be self-evidently a good thing. There is great – and massively undervalued – expertise in the social work profession, but social care is not like, say, heart surgery, where I would probably be happy for most decisions about my care to be taken by the experts. Social care is more ambitious than heart surgery. It doesn’t just want to help your body function, it wants to be a route you can…

Shared Lives is where a trained and approved Shared Lives carer and their family agrees to include an older or disabled person in their family life, often on a long term basis. There are around 10,000 SL carers in the UK, of which 3,800 are NAAPS members. There are around 10,000 SL carers in the UK, of which 3,800 are NAAPS members. Shared Lives is a great example of an approach to meeting people's support and accommodation needs, which is based on people forming relationships, a household…

We have launched a new guide on personalisation - see www.naaps.org.uk and click News. Meanwhile, as reported in Community Care, Unison have surveyed social workers on personalisation with depressing,results. For too many front line staff, personalisation is still seen as a new set of processes and forms to introduce, rather than as a culture change. Respondents…