Citizen Portal - Self-Directed Support

Self-Directed Support is concerned with respect for the individual and freedom of choice. Along the way, we expect this agenda to dislocate current patterns of behaviour on many fronts: social care practitioners will find their traditional roles challenged, new markets will emerge for service provision and service users will face new responsibilities.

Access to high quality, accurate and timely information may make the difference between a service user having a calm, enjoyable experience and one which is fraught with difficulties. If we really want service users to grasp the opportunities presented by the new agenda, we need to provide tools which can transform a recipient of care into an active manager of their own experiences.

The Liquidlogic Citizen Portal provides some key building blocks. In brief, the Portal enables a service user to do three things:

- Maintain details of their support plan and related information in real time. Subsets of this information are pulled through into Liquidlogic IAS so that the social care team can also view this information, thus gaining a rich picture of the hopes and aspirations, practical objectives and obstacles, faced by the service user

- Maintain accurate budgetary information. Key data is pulled through into the Portal from Liquidlogic IAS, to provide the service user with clarity of financial information and the social care team with an overview of planned and actual expenditure against budget – improving confidence both for service users and for funders

- Communicate with the wider support team, enabling the service user to sit at the heart of a ‘social network’

This is only possible because the Citizen Portal is designed to integrate fully with the underlying social care system (initially Liquidlogic IAS, although the Portal has been designed to be platform-independent). Thus everybody involved in a service user’s care is able to share common information, with a convenient forum for communication.

Undoubtedly self-directed support will yield many challenges in the months and years to come; creativity on the part of software suppliers, working in partnership with local authorities, will be essential to provide the responsiveness and subtlety which this new agenda demands. The Citizen Portal is one such example.

You can find out more about Liquidlogic's Citizen Portal solution by e mailing melanie.holmes@liquidlogic.co.uk.