‘I have got my life back’: users' experience of direct payments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After years of activism by disabled people's organizations, the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996 made Direct Payment (DP) schemes a reality. Proponents of DP argue that it allows greater freedom and control for those people using it, but as these programmes only came into effect in 1997, few studies have tried to substantiate these claims. This paper reports on a two‐year evaluation of two DP schemes in Wales. Using primarily users' feedback the paper focuses on the effects of DP and difficulties encountered, as well as why people chose—or did not choose—DP in the first place. User responses indicate a broad range of beneficial outcomes, including improved self‐esteem, increased control over lives, deeper and more lasting relationships, and new interpersonal, vocational and lifestyle opportunities, as a result of the greater flexibility and freedom of choice enabled by DP. Family carers expressed similar satisfaction with DP schemes, also citing greater freedoms as a result of increased flexibility. While some potential users expressed concern over the administration of a DP scheme, users found that, with support from a user driven Independent Living Scheme, the administrative burden was manageable, and that ultimately the DP scheme was a welcome approach to support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".