Impersonalisation: the corruption of social care. Competing dimensions, personal perspectives and experiences of care

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that ‘personalisation’ is a rebranding policy that has had three effects: to disguise deep structural faults in the organisation, funding and practice of social care; to deceive the population into assuming (until they come to need it) that personalised social care exists, and to systematically undermine and destroy what remains of truly personal, relationship based care in communities. I give numerous examples of the ways in which care homes have been corrupted throughout the relentless privatisation, commercialisation and regulation of the last thirty years; I tell of my own experience of social care since the 1960s, and I give three accounts of people I know who have been able to find real and very personal care still surviving in their neighbourhoods.