Risk and caring relationships

If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk.
Jane Austen, Persuasion

These words are said by the heroine at the end of Persuasion, when everything has worked out alright, and she can reflect with generosity on her past unhappiness. Although she’d been persuaded to choose safety, not risk, it left her deeply unhappy, which then troubled those who loved her too.

These are the kind of trade-offs that sometimes we all have to think about, even though often enough we do not consciously frame our decisions in terms of risks and the resulting gains or losses. For those of us involved in caring relationships, decisions often get translated into the language of risk taking, risk management, regulation and protection. These can be hugely complicated and often contested issues, laden with anxiety, uncertainty, myths and assumptions.

Despite, or rather, because of, the complexity of the area, JRF has started exploring the connected themes of rights, responsibilities, risk and regulation in the lives of adults who use care and support. The point of the exploration is to find answers to the fundamental question: what needs to change to enable us to have good lives?

The first set of scoping papers come from a diverse range of authors with different expertise and different levels of familiarity with social care. The overall picture they paint of the world of risk and regulation, and indeed of rights and responsibilities, is neither ideology nor contradiction-free. They show how we all want different things, for ourselves and others, and want regulation to do different things too, sometimes at the same time. Usually this involves more protection or more freedom.

Some papers also share positive and practical strategies for tackling persistent myths of a blame and compensation culture, and of over-zealous regulatory requirements, particularly regarding health and safety. One example from the work of the Better Regulation Commission is ‘buying time to think’, a routine part of a process in the midst of a public storm to step back, reflect and rationally consider options rather than try and react instantly. One author argues that acknowledging and managing anxiety about risk is an important first step. However, the next step is to build society’s resilience to better enable it to deal with public risk.

Personalisation, a policy cornerstone of recent adult social care, is a concept that several of the papers examine. Service users have greater autonomy to make decisions, which means more power but also more risks. Some authors argue that truly person-centred support also requires creating an infrastructure that can provide individualised support.

Finally, in different ways the papers remind us of the value and centrality of good caring relationships – both formal and informal. If a relationship is good, strong and supported it contributes to all those involved feeling secure and empowered to engage with uncertainty and risk. Just like the heroine of Persuasion did.