Significant background work has been undertaken to take stock of current contracts, SLA’s and partnerships, and the Commissioning Strategy will be in place for consultation in December 2016.   

The Commissioning team was established in the summer of 2015 with the appointment of:

• Independent and Third Sector Relationships Section Manager
• Commissioning Manager (Adults)

And supported by the realignment of staff:

• Commissioning Manager (Families First Lead)
• Information Officer
• Administrative Support
• Older People’s Strategy Officer
• Third Sector Liaison Officer (CVSC)
• Partnerships Facilitation team [from November 2015]

The team has reviewed existing documents from across services and met with Service Managers to review current services, undertake stock-take of current contracts, SLAs and Partnerships and discuss their on-going and future commissioning and support needs and intentions.

The Social Care Commissioning Strategy will be in first draft by December 2016.  Market facilitation workshops will begin in May 2016, with Market position statements and a Population needs assessment complete by January 2017.

The Commissioning Strategy is an all-encompassing document which analyses needs, the current market, a shared vision for future service delivery, and our plans for service delivery in the next 1-5 years as well as the budgetary implications of these plans.  We will be consulting with internal and external partners and stakeholders, current and potential service providers, as well as service users and their carers over the next few months and seeking their views on what social care services should be delivered in Conwy in the future, how they should be delivered and by who.

Good progress has been made within the complaints service to strengthen a number of areas.

The Complaints, Compliments and Representations 2014-15 Annual Report was positively received by Scrutiny committee in October 2015. It reflected upon issues raised within the 2014 internal audit, and evidenced significant progress against the improvement action plan.

• Single Point of Access (SPOA) is now used to receive all SS complaints in the absence of the Complaints Officer.
• There is now a clear management structure. The complaints service sits within the policy and audit service within Quality Standards which has two tiers of management support available full time to the complaints officer.
• The Complaints Officer’s role has now been agreed and funded as a full time post (previously only part time funded).
• Complaints are recorded and monitored on a dedicated spreadsheet to manage timeliness effectively.
• Stage 2 complaints are sent to Section Managers which has improved their awareness, engagement and commitment with the process.
• The Complaints Policy has been updated to reflect issues identified in the audit.
• A programme of training is being delivered via team meetings.
• Delivered a workshop for Managers highlighting lessons learnt and areas for improvement.
• Complaints Officer will be attending Service Managers meetings.

We have plans in place to evaluate the impact of the Edge of Care Panel. 

The Edge of Care panel was initially held monthly to discuss complex cases where children and young people are most at risk of coming into care.  However following feedback from the social workers it was agreed to provide a fortnightly panel. The panel has also established links with CAMHS (Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service) professionals, and the Youth Justice Strategic Manager, to discuss complex cases deemed to be at risk of escalating.

The effectiveness of the panel will be evaluated at the end of 2016/17, and it is anticipated that the evaluation will show evidence that children are prevented from escalating through risk factors, and indeed that risk is reduced

We are evaluating ways of measuring the impact of the Vulnerable People Service.

The Vulnerable People structure is now in place and all appointments have been made. The service is developing a “whole-service” culture, sharing skills and best working practices to improve outcomes for vulnerable people.

The team has explored evaluative frameworks for measuring service user outcomes, to provide hard evidence of the beneficial outcomes being achieved.  The established “Outcome Stars” system was considered as a possible solution to be purchased, providing a “before and after” assessment of service user outcomes, and providing direct evidence of the impact and effectiveness of the service in helping people to achieve their outcomes. Additionally, the system would provide direct positive feedback to individual clients regarding the progress they have made, thus reinforcing and consolidating their successes.

A decision has been made to develop an evaluation model within our client information system (PARIS), aligned to the new assessments required under the SSWB Act.

Whilst a number of risks have been identified within Mental Health, we are actively engaging with our Health colleagues to take mitigating action and manage these. 

There have been concerns surrounding mental health services that have been identified as risks both for the service and for the Council corporately.

Concerns around the lack of integrated systems, processes, practice and culture between health and social care are being resolved via monthly Senior Management meetings, learning events and resulting action plan and follow up to ensure changes are embedded into practice.   Improvements to the service have also been discussed and agreed.

There are also risks that poor performance information from Mental Health leads to operational difficulties (ie. those operational aspects of Community Mental Health Teams which are under CCBC control).

One potential solution that was trialled was the use of the Social Care Paris system by Health colleagues which worked well.  However, Health will be using a different system and in the meantime have agreed to explore how performance data from their system can be supplied to support the data required by Social Care.

A report to Scrutiny in June 2016 will request support for the recommendation that we explore alternative models of delivery of mental health services.