Agenda item

Adult Social Care Use of Resources Peer Challenge

This report presents the findings of the ADASS/LGA Peer Challenge into the use of resources in Adult Social Care in City of York Council, highlighting both good practice and recommendations intended to help CYC improve its approach. It also includes the high-level action plan developed from the recommendations.

Minutes:

The Committee considered a report which presented the findings of the ADASS/LGA Peer Challenge into the use of resources in Adult Social Care in City of York Council, highlighting both good practice and recommendations intended to help CYC improve its approach. It also included the high-level action plan developed from the recommendations. The Corporate Director of People was in attendance to present the report and respond to questions.

 

Key points raised during the presentation of the report included:

·        That the Use of Resources Peer Challenge, assembled by the Local Government Association, was comprised of people working in adult’s social care in multiple local authorities and at multiple levels. The Challenge was always led by an experienced director of adult’s services and also contained other managers and elected members.

·        ­That the Challenges main focuses were: Leadership, Strategy and Vision; Business Processes and Long-Term Support and Recovery.

·        That the Challenge had found York’s adult’s services’ leadership to be insightful and committed to delivering excellent services, with an engaged, briefed and experienced portfolio holder, but that significant challenges lay ahead to achieve the ambitions of the leadership team, which was expected to take up to 3 years.

·        The Challenge had applauded the New Alliance with key partners to deliver effective place based services in York.

·        It was recognised that more investment was needed in data quality, business intelligence and finance, and that investment was being put in place.

·        That frontline staff had been working well in extremely difficult circumstances, but there was a danger of exhaustion. Therefore, additional resources were being allocated to ensure that differing skills were well distributed and support for staff was available.

·        That a Corporate Board for the development of People’s Services, including adult’s services had been established.

·        In children’s services, there was a much more well defined data set than in adult’s services. Therefore, work was being done to develop team level dashboards for managers in the service to provide them with up to date data.

·        That social services had worked well and more closely with partners and the community throughout the pandemic, and that was to continue long-term. There had been a shift away from working in specialisms to working on a community, neighbourhood based approach.

·        The Challenge noted that York needed to be more flexible in its commissioning, which was one of the reasons for the creation of the Director of Commissioning post.

 

In response to questions from members, it was noted that:

·        ­­A cross-sector approach to recruitment was needed given the staff shortages across all services, and that work was ongoing to make employment in the care sector in York a career of choice. Exhaustion levels amongst staff were high following the pandemic, but the staff group was also very committed to their work and the city. Therefore, it was important to offer increased support to staff, particularly in the area of trauma recovery in order for York to continue to be an attractive place to work in the care profession.

·        The Peer Challenge self-assessment asked for self-ratings on a series of areas, and for accompanying evidence to support them. York’s self-assessment found that the usage and availability of data to frontline staff was the most pressing need. The Peer Challenge’s assessment of York agreed with these findings.

·        The reports of the Peer Challenge were not published because they contained information on service users which would need redacting, as well as specifying other authorities.

·        An action plan, with an monthly quality assurance report could be provided to members.

·        The Association of Directors of Adults Social Services Yorkshire and Humber Region meet every week to share practice and challenges, as well as holding an annual review. Using this forum, local authorities compared their services to gain insight and ideas on best practice. For example, City of York Council had been looking at regional local authorities’ work on demand management to improve its services, and it was reported that other local authorities had been observing York’s work on local area co-ordination and social prescribing to improve their services. The Peer Challenge took a more national view.

·        Research in Practice for Adults developed research for local authorities that enhances the way they can deliver practice. They had worked with York on transitional and complex safeguarding, looking at young adults being exploited within the family unit.

·        Research was being done by local universities under a 5 year grant on a number of key areas of practice development, including on how to improve support to those who self-fund their services.

·        City of York Council had worked closely with North Yorkshire County Council throughout the pandemic across all services and continued to do so, including sharing of data-sets and comparative data.

·        City of York Council had been active in building partnerships, preceding pending national health reforms, including the York Health and Care Alliance, which included CYC and representatives from across the health economy. The Alliance considered how best to develop place-based approaches to delivery in the wake of reforms.

 

 

Resolved: That the Committee will receive updates on the systematic plan to ensure effective use of resources.

 

Reason: This is to enable effective scrutiny of the progress being made in this area.

Supporting documents:

 

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