Can person-centred planning fulfil a strategic planning role? Comments on Mansell & Beadle-Brown

Policy appears to regard person-centred planning (PCP) as underpinning strategic planning. While accepting the logic of its role in planning for individuals, this commentary argues that PCP cannot fulfil a strategic planning role because the development of PCP on a wide enough scale to be useful for this purpose is itself a strategic development, which will take considerable time and resources to achieve. There is still a place for population-based norms or targets based on available epidemiological data to indicate the needed scale of provision and associated resource requirement. Three illustrations are described. In conclusion, it is noted that the current lack of indicative provision targets is a weakness of recently issued policy, an absence which does nothing to safeguard the interests of those who depend on service support