Consumer directed care involves a lot more than distributing vouchers to service users according to a British community care expert.

David Challis from the University of Manchester spoke at the Aged and Community Services Australia (ASCA) national conference about a pilot program in the UK in which 1,000 social care recipients were given individualised budgets.

Although pilot participants were given the opportunity to experiment with their individual budgets, most of the funding was allocated as direct payments to clients, although older clients were less likely to choose this method.

Some clients chose to use their funding for craft classes, gym memberships and even massage services for their carers.

Professor Challis told delegates that the project demonstrated a need for further consideration about resource allocation and spending guidelines.

“There has been debate – and it’s still unresolved – about how the money should be spent,” he said.

“In Britain there was a conflict between care needs and leisure needs. Is it justifiable to use the funding to go to a football match or to buy a computer?”

The introduction of individual budgets was met with a mixed response from provider organisations involved in the project.

In their feedback the providers noted that they had lost some clients and staff members when service users began to employ personal assistants directly.

However some providers had begun to provide new types of care and services, including working as human resource ‘managers’ for clients who were purchasing their own care services.

Professor Challis also noted that the shift to individual budgets posed no serious threat to the provision of traditional care services.

“People expected when this program was first rolled out that the changes would be wholesale and that it would transform the role of providers,” he said.

“In fact, what we found was that the changes occurred at the margins. People still wanted their basic care needs to be met in a fairly ‘safe’, traditional way.”