Contents

Enabling Information: A report on improving access and raising standards in information services for disabled people and their carers in Scotland.

4 Relationships Between Providers

4.1 Relationships between the statutory and independent sectors

An important aspect of community care is the encouragement of greater integration of services provided by the independent and statutory sectors. We can see evidence of this in the practice of some regional councils. The increasing emphasis on the division of responsibility between the purchaser and the provider of services, and the move from a grant-based culture to one based on contract and service level agreements will to some extent facilitate the fuller integration of the voluntary sector in statutory provision. However the importance of independent sources of information and advice being available must not be overlooked.

Characteristics of the present relationship between agencies in the statutory and voluntary sectors can be described in terms of:

Funding

The Working Group considers that local authority funding is extremely important and that many of the problems existing at present could be improved by a more effective use of existing funding. Funding may be given on an ongoing basis, or for particular short term projects such as the Carers Information Pack in Fife. The development of community care forums in Scotland demonstrates how the injection of funding can create "added value" in the voluntary sector.

Information sharing

The extent to which information is shared between the voluntary and statutory sectors is significant in terms of the information available to the end user.

The Devon Disability Information and Advice Federation, as part of NDIP, has consciously improved the sharing of information between the two sectors, to the benefit of both: voluntary sector bodies have access to the DLF database, while local authority staff have access to the information produced by local disability groups, and to the Community Care database produced by the federation.

Grampian Caredata has chosen to operate in a similar way. Their database is made freely available to agencies in the voluntary sector, thus saving groups the time needed to collect basic information.

Similarly groups in the voluntary sector can be useful sources of information to people in the statutory sector, either about specialised conditions, or particular client groups. Leaflets produced by Age Concern are preferred by one local authority's staff to the leaflets produced by their own authority. Professionals are frequent users of information from organisations such as Disability Scotland, Enable and the Scottish Association for Mental Health.

Referrals between the voluntary and statutory sectors

A successful voluntary sector organisation can attract considerable numbers of referrals, and the experience of SNIP in Edinburgh is that as health professionals and social workers have become more aware of the service offered, SNIP has received increasing numbers of enquiries from professionals.

The development of a network of agencies involved in providing information and advice to disabled people in Lothian has been prompted partly by a recognition of the importance of raising the level of awareness of what agencies in both the voluntary and the statutory sector have to offer locally.

The relationship between specialist and generalist services

This is a sensitive area. There can be a problem if a social work department contracts specialised services to agencies in the voluntary sector, as mainstream social workers may "offload" clients to that specialist service rather than provide the service themselves. The use of the "disability dustbin" may result in an extremely low level of awareness amongst local authority staff about disability issues. While it may frequently be desirable that people are referred to specialist sources of information and advice, this should not detract from the goal that general service providers should be able to meet the needs of all their clients, and that they should receive sufficient training to do this, and in particular, disability equality awareness training.

PSI has suggested in its final report on NDIP that one of the weaknesses of the Coopers and Lybrand report which shaped NDIP, was the failure to recognise that multi-agency working would lead to "tension, delay, and a lack of progress". PSI argue that the different organisational cultures of the statutory and voluntary sectors make it difficult to establish effective joint working arrangements, and this is compounded by the funding relationship between the sectors. As discussed in Part 1, section 3.6 above, this situation is unlikely to improve in the immediate future, with reorganisation of local government, but there is perhaps a greater degree of optimism in Scotland that it is possible to develop fruitful relationships between the statutory and independent sectors, as evidenced by some of the examples given in section 3.1 above.

4.2 Relationship between national and local providers

The relationship between national and local providers has changed in line with the developments within the disability movement as a whole, as described in Part 1, section 3. The traditional charitable bodies representing the interests of disabled people tend to be autonomous national bodies, relatively well funded by central