Tailoring services to meet individual needs
[Pic caption – ‘Who is the person?’ – an exercise in identifying key aspects of a person’s identity and lifestyle as part of a journey of establishing what is important to and for them in their life.]
Tailoring involves ‘making, repairing, altering or adjusting’ a garment to fit the specification of the customer. Tailoring services requires a similar range of skills and a level of precision in establishing the requirements of the customer and exploring a range of options to ensure the end product is bespoke.
Enabling a person to articulate that specification can be a skill worth its weight in gold as it is not only the key to establishing what an individual wants and needs, but provides the raw material for a service seeking to design and offer citizen-centred solutions. In service language, we are describing OUTCOMES here.
We easily confuse outcomes and outputs. Outputs are the description of the service we provide. Outcomes describe the result of delivering those outputs. For an individual, this may represent what they have achieved, what they are able to do differently, what they have changed or managed to maintain in their life. ‘Success’ has to be evaluated by the person themselves. Success may also represent the person’s experience of the process and how they felt they were treated, involved, respected or had their dignity maintained.
The Older People’s Commissioner for Wales exemplifies this in setting out high level outcomes which underpin a good quality life; a life that has value, meaning and purpose (Framework for Action 2013-2017). The themes identified are expressed in ‘I’ terms and are a true reflection of what older people are saying they want and need:
- I feel listened to and respected
- I can do the things that matter to me
- I get the help I need, when I need it, in the way I want it
- I live in a place that suits me and my life
We also find the model developed by Simon Duffy in Architecture for Personalisation (Centre for Welfare Reform) helpful in providing a structure against which to measure achievement of outcomes in developing citizen-centred services and support. He describes four ‘outer’ dimensions in personalisation:
- Capabilities – being able to exercise and develop our own personal capabilities, strengths and gifts
- Connections – recognising people can only thrive in relationships with others and that loneliness is the enemy of human development and citizenship
- Access – people need a wider, accessible community which offers all the kinds of different places that are central to human existence – work, healing, prayer, fun and creativity
- Control – which is central to our ability to be an effective citizen and without which we can come adrift, subject to power and control by others.
He says that all four of these outer dimensions are important. If they are diminished then personal growth and a life of citizenship becomes much harder to achieve. However, there is an ‘inner’ dimension which we might think of as personal resilience, or the human spirit. ‘Even in the toughest and most difficult situations that spirit can burn bright; but even in the best and most positive environment the spirit can become weak and we can fall into despair or lose our way.’
It serves to remind us that the purpose of developing citizen-centred services and support is about building a society where everyone can find a way of being that makes sense.
The skill to engage and motivate a person in the process of problem solving, and of crafting individual outcomes, is a valuable asset. This is even more precious where a person feels disadvantaged, marginalised, excluded or neglected and may never have been given the opportunity to reflect on what they would like from their life. It is an asset worth investing in.
Elissa Renouf leads Central’s care and support portfolio. She draws on many years’ experience of developing, delivering and managing multi-professional development programmes related to assessment and care/support planning, personal budgets, enablement, self-directed support, person-centred planning, service and team development initiatives.
Central can be contacted on 0121 643 4745, info@centralconsultancy.co.uk or www.centralconsultancy.co.uk