FACS or Fiction? the impact of the policy Fair Access to Care Services on social care assessments of older visually impaired people

Abstract

The Department of Health's Fair Access to Care Services (FACS) policy initiative was intended to achieve a greater degree of equity and consistency in the assessment and provision of social care services to adults in England. This article reports on the impact of this policy some 18 months after it was implemented. It is based on interviews carried out in one local authority with a sample of six practitioners specialising in the assessment of the social care needs of visually impaired people. The findings from this small-scale study suggest that FACS has not made substantial difference to the social care assessments of older visually impaired people by specialist assessors. At least four factors seem to have rendered FACS largely ineffective in the reported practice of this one group of social work staff and these reflect their relative autonomy. These are an absence of FACS training for practitioners, collective agreement by practitioners about what they should do in practice, an ability and willingness by practitioners to use professional discretion, and the ambiguity of purpose at the heart of the FACS policy.