Welcome to the 2018-19 Director of Social Services Annual Report. It is great to see a strong focus at the beginning of the report illustrating the significant engagement activity that has taken place over the year via surveys, talking to people and supporting key events. We have produced an engagement report which we will share widely to demonstrate our real commitment to the views and opinions of our customers.
This year’s report sets out our commitment to the emotional health and wellbeing of our residents as we shift to a model that recognises ‘early help at the time we need it’ as the key concept that matters to people. Keeping active, having access to play and developing targeted groups to promote physical activity for those who use our services are all key to this agenda. We are working hard with our partners to promote emotional resilience and ‘good’ mental health across a number of service areas in different ways and many good examples can be seen in the second section of the report.
Safeguarding continues to be a corporate commitment and we are proud to have achieved a Social Care Accolade during the year for our Child Sexual Exploitation prevention agenda, working collaboratively with our key partners and young people with lived experience.
Working to promote independence and resilience is one of our pledges and the report references a range of activities that supports this, including family support interventions, foster carer development and training, and employability schemes.
We mentioned our early intervention offer in last year’s report and are proud to see the developments come to fruition including our support mosaic, family centres and family support teams being embedded within communities.
I can’t mention the positive success stories without paying tribute to the great team that enables our ambition to flourish including the workforce, our quality and monitoring team, the delivery of our commissioning intent and our business support. This is not without its challenges as we continue to face a shortage of resource that means we must deliver more with less year on year.
So how we do we know we are on the right track? The performance schedule at the end of the report points to a stable and consistent pattern and this is borne out by our external regulatory activity throughout the year via various inspection and regulatory visits.
A final note to thank the team that supported the creation of this report and also to the democratic support we continue to receive as we strive to deliver good quality social care to the residents of Conwy.
Jenny Williams
Strategic Director of Social Care & Education Services
Conwy County Borough Council