Think Local Act Personal Tag Listing

This SCIE summary presents an overview of the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 for England and Wales. The MCA promotes and safeguards decision-making within a legal framework by: empowering people to make decisions for themselves where possible, protecting people who lack capacity; allowing people to plan ahead.

This SCIE briefing examines the implications of the personalisation agenda for carers and the two main elements, primarily that personalisation should:impact on the support provided to the person being cared for, which may help you both; affect the support provided for carers, after a carer's assessment.

This document outlines a protocol for developing and expanding local, user-led support services and centres for independent living. DH guidance states provision of support services are key to successful Direct Payments implementation and that "Support provided through voluntary/recipient-run organisations has been shown to be particularly effective and valued by recipients".

This case study is a report taken directly from Essex county council. It is provided here to illustrate how working in partnership with a responsive support service and an effective user network can help increase the uptake of Direct Payments.

If you are a disabled person about to start receiving a Direct Payment to employ your own personal assistants (PAs), this book put together by Sian Vasey for the National Centre for Independent Living covers recruitment, managing and using PAs in social situations and at work.

With service user and carer participation firmly on the agenda, there is a need to find out what difference service user and carer participation is making. This online resource from SCIE is based on research to develop measures to help evaluate the impact of service user and carer participation.

This online guide focuses on how practitioners and managers can initiate and sustain the participation of adult service users, including older people, in ways that empower service users and reflect a shared commitment to developing social care services in a more democratic way by adopting a whole systems approach.

This paper from the Social Care Institute for Excellence presents the process and outcomes of research into service user and carer participation in developing social care services. The paper looks at what we know about it and how evaluations are being conducted.