Personal budgets and international contexts: Lessons from home and abroad

This paper examines a selection of emerging lessons on the design and implementation of personal budget schemes from some of the international literature. It is not a report of an exhaustive systematic review covering all related issues (such as social care market development), but gives some key lessons for promoting personal budget uptake from recent research on user and carer responses, staff training and development, risk and safeguarding, and cost-effectiveness implications. The paper also compares some features of different approaches in other countries and offers a brief exploration of the policy contexts. In the UK, while personal budgets aim at giving individuals more choice and control over their care and support, and promote independent living, they need to be seen as part of the wider adult social care transformation agenda and are just one part of the picture. The provision of personal budgets needs to be consistent with the principles and values of personalisation — personal budgets should maximise choice and control for people using services, their carers, and families wherever possible. International research shows that, to achieve this, independent advice and support services (such as user-led organisations), and confident, well-informed and trained staff, capable of relationship-based working, are vital.