Every type of business has to deal with supply and demand – balancing what they can provide against what people need. In these challenging economic times, there’s a great need to operate our services as efficiently as possible. This means making sure we’ve got enough staff to meet needs and that the staff are well trained, and have the skills and knowledge to get the job done swiftly, without wasting time or resources.
Sometimes, we need to think “out of the box” and find new ways for services to work together.
Transformation Programme
Background
A key deliverable of the SSD Transformation Programme is ‘to ensure that the Social Care workforce across all sectors* has the capabilities to meet the demands and standards expected by the department’ *including external providers.
To meet the requirements of theWelsh Government’s Statutory Guidance on the Role and Accountabilities of the Director of Social Services (SGRADSS) for: fulfilling overall responsibility for Social Services workforce planning, training and professional development’ (p.8).A whole sector workforce plan which identifies and aims to implement measures to ensure a sufficiently large, skilled, safe and focused workforce to meet the assessed needs… (p.15) (SGRADSS June 2009).
The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act requires the care sector to deliver a workforce with the right skills, in a timely manner to meet the care needs of modern Wales.
What’s changed?
We’ve established a project approach to developing a workforce strategy for social care sector within Conwy. The project also sets out a framework for implementing and reporting.
A key objective of the project and strategy will be to ensure workforce development is aligned to the strategic objectives of Social services. It will set out how we shape both the internal and external workforce to meet the commissioning needs of the department.
What else will change?
The strategy will take a whole sector approach and in doing so, it will ensure the sector has a workforce fit for purpose.
A key deliverable of the strategy will be to demonstrate how we evidence the return on investment across the social care workforce. This will entail moving away from traditional models of training delivery and evaluation to a more flexible approach to learning and development linked to outcomes for service users.
Enablement Training
Background
There’s an old saying, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” This principle is at the heart of Enablement. Rather than provide services which do things for people, enablement is about supporting people so that they can do more for themselves, and become less dependent on services.
What’s changed?
After looking around for suitable training packages, we decided that the courses on offer were not quite what we were looking for. We therefore worked together to create our own package of training. The idea behind this was to train staff to work with people, to enable and empower themselves and become less dependent.
What difference has it made?
We have so far piloted this two day training once, and are this will be evaluated in the summer of 2014. The training focussed on Active Support, skills teaching and behaviour that challenges.