All Frontline Disability Services
Recruitment of suitable staff is increasingly problematic for community support frontline posts, with very few applicants for advertised jobs.
Realignment of the Disability Service
Realignment of the teams, managing change, uncertainty for staff, accounting for staff preferences and striving to achieve this for them fairly across the service.
Ensuring the workforce is trained to deliver the Act
The capacity of trainers on the national training framework to train the workforce in Conwy.
Regional Learning & Development
Welsh Government are seeking to achieve one Learning and Development plan for the whole North Wales region, via the Social Care Workforce Development Partnership (SCWDP).
DOLs
Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards became law on the 1st April 2009. The Supreme Court Judgement of the 19th March 2014 has clarified the DoLS threshold. The criteria has been greatly reduced, which has impacted on Conwy’s ability to meet its statutory legal requirements. The impact of the judgement is that there is now a waiting list of 337 people awaiting DoLS assessments. The number of people estimated to need a DoLS assessment is expected to increase gradually year on year in line with demographic trends.
Conwy has responded by training twelve Social Work/Occupational Therapy professionals in total to carry out assessments. Each assessor has to carry out one assessment per month, this is additional of their usual case load and consists of six separate assessments per service user. There are also three permanent Best Interest Assessors all undergoing training in Chester University. (Graduation May 2016).These Assessors are dedicated to DOL’s service.
The legal requirements of the new case law cannot be met in the short term due to a lack of resources and this leaves the department open to litigation challenge from families and from people who have been deprived of their liberty without the legal safeguards being applied.
Social Services & Wellbeing Act
Under the new Act, it will be a challenge to ensure an equitable and fair approach to those people who have been in receipt of services for some time, and in addition, those who will become new service users after April.