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Personalisation Progress???

Here is my letter to Phil Hope, Minister of Health, in response to the Livability findings this week about the lack of progress in local authorities and the NHS developing and implementing the Personalisation Agenda. The Livability report says:
Chief executive of Livability Mary Bishop said:
"The results of our research are extremely worrying. Personal Budgets have the potential to transform the lives of disabled people by giving them choice and control and yet awareness of them is woefully inadequate. With just over a year to go until they are rolled out across England, it is clear that central and local government are ill prepared.


Hello Mr Hope.

You should know that Norfolk is a little ahead with its Personalisation Agenda and Preparation for Personal Budgets. There is a joint strategy for disabled service users to build and monitor the delivery. This strategy has fully involved service users and the Norfolk Coalition of Disabled People led the joint board in planning and drawing up the strategy. We are currently on module four of a six module training process for disabled users to monitor the implementation of Norfolk's Joint Personalisation Agenda.

You should also know that Norfolk is disgracefully behind and in breach of disability discrimination principles by completely excluding people with mental health problems from this excellent strategy; thereby acting selectively against that community. I have written twice to the Joint Board to find out why this is, once last November and once last month. I have not even received an acknowledgement.

Heddwch.

Mike Cox.

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