‘Call it personalisation if you like’: the realities and dilemmas of organising care in a small rural community

Abstract

Using the threatened closure of a 15-place local authority care home and the policy of ‘personalisation’ of care as a starting point, Beechfield Community Care (BCC) is aiming to set up a comprehensive care organisation serving a small town and the scattered rural parishes surrounding it. This paper questions the convoluted thinking behind the ‘personalisation agenda’; discusses the difficulties of reconciling the national and local government version of personalisation with a community's ideas and expectations of genuinely personal care; and relates and analyses the struggle to establish a truly independent, community-owned and -run ‘personal care’ organisation. Beechfield Community Care has to utilise and exploit government (national and local) policy and initiatives, including ‘personalisation’, as the main channels to the resources needed to set up the organisation and run it. The organisation and management — the ‘bureaucratisation’ — of social care is always somewhat at odds with the truly personal and communal, human motivations and instincts of caring for one another individually and collectively. Effective care organisations find ways to engage the caring energy and spirit of human beings and their communities, to support and develop them, and to coordinate them, and this is the challenge that faces Beechfield Community Care.

Keywords:

• personalisation
• community action
• bureaucracy
• social care
• rural community
• defences against anxiety