We are aware that the language of health and social care is rapidly changing, so to help staff and service users keep up to date with current policy agendas, here is a quick guide to current policy terminology in health and social care, with particular reference to mental health.

 

Please let us know of anything you think we have missed, which you would like added to future editions of this essential Guide.

 

 

Recovery: Persuade GPs and psychiatrists to tell everyone they are now well and don't need help - cut services

Wellbeing: Tell everyone they are well and don't need to use services anymore. Give them a leaflet instead. Close services.

Social inclusion: Close all day services, tell people these are not good for them - save money

Self-Stigmatisation: Thinking that people think you are nuts and don't like you, after being drugged up and locked up and denied jobs and called names for 20-30 years or so. What's WRONG with you???

Personalisation: tell everyone they can have a personal budget to choose the services they want. Cut the personal budgets. Close the services as they no longer have enough clients. Save money

Self directed support: In Glasgow tell people they have to pay for their drop in/resource centre with their direct payment leaving it facing closure when this combined sum doesn't add up to the previous block grant

Personal Independence Payment (PIP): Take people off Disability Living Allowance which used to enable people with disabilities to pay for the extra help they needed beyond basic services to live a dignified independent life. Instead give them PIP which they must use to pay for the new 'personalised' (see above) basic services, thus reducing their personal independence and dignity but saving money.

Co-production: Pay a few service users who more or less agree with the government (drop them or ignore them if they don't) to help put together policies and then say you've consulted service users in developing your cost-saving measures - cut services and save money.

User involvement: the old name for co-production.

Therapy: Sit people down in front of a computer screen, and sack the therapist.

Improved Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT): Develop a form of therapy that can be delivered by computer if necessary as it doesn't need a human touch and only takes 6 sessions (see Therapy above). Cut all other forms of therapy that require real, intelligent, empathetic human beings to deliver them and which take as long as it takes to help someone get over their problems. Tell GPs this is the only form of therapy they are now allowed to prescribe. Cut costs and proclaim that everyone now has better access to talking therapies. Ignore feedback from most service users that this wasn't what they wanted and didn't help them.

Choice: Tell people they have choice, tell people they are their choices, tell people what the choices are, tell people to make the right choices, tell people what the right choices are. Say services are now choice-based, cut services as it was people's choice, and they made the right choice. Sack everyone who questions the decision-making process.

 

Integration or Joint Working between health and social care:  Mental health services: "We won't fund you any more but your mental health needs will still be met". Adult Social Care: "We will only fund physical disability". Pass the buck, don't fund any mental health needs, allow people to fall through the gap, save money.

Re-tendering: make 10 voluntary sector organisations, undercut by 5 private companies which include Atos and A4E, bid for one regional mental health day service contract. Destroy local services and relationships. Save money.

Peer support: make NHS support workers redundant and say that you are employing peer support workers (on a lower salary of course) to help provide role models to service users on how to get better. Cut jobs, save money, get a select few off sickness benefits, appear progressive.

Independent living: tell service users you are on your own from now on. We (mental health professionals) should have done this years ago to empower you rather than have made you dependent, only to toss you out now. Never mind. We know better now. Cut services, save money, lose track of the vulnerable who now must fend for themselves.

Adult Safeguarding: in order to deal with public disquiet, set up a new system to try to track the vulnerable who have been tossed ruthlessly out of services (or who have been parked in over stretched residential homes) by all of the preceding policies, and make plans to do something about the abuse you now suspect they might be experiencing. Don't worry too much about whether the person likes the safeguarding plan, or even knows about it, or whether it actually works. You don't want to waste all the money which the other policies have saved and which can be used to reduce taxes and reelect the same Government.

With acknowledgement to: Phil Thomas, Alastair Kemp, Joanna Maddog, Graham Morgan Eleni Chambers, Anonymous employed service user who wants to keep her job.

 

Jan Wallcraft © 2014