Not Throwing out the Partnership Agenda with the Personalisation Bathwater

Abstract

The personalisation agenda currently appears as a key strand of the Government's approach to health and social care services. On the face of it this offers an exciting new future where service users drive the way services are joined up, which for some may be welcome given the paucity of evidence to show that the organisationally‐driven partnership working of the past decade has delivered real and tangible outcomes for service users. There is some suggestion that in the future any talk about partnerships will be about this citizen‐state interaction, rather than one between health and social care agencies. This paper argues that there is a real danger in suggesting that personalisation negates the need for health and social care agencies to work together in partnership; instead this interface is more imperative than ever. In this paper we provide an overview of the debates around personalisation and partnership and set out the case why partnership should not be forgotten, and indeed will be key, in the success of the personalisation agenda.