|
Adult Social Care Peer Challenge Week 16-19 June 2015
Dear colleague,
You’ll recall from
previous communications that Devon County Council has commissioned from the
Local Government Association a Peer Challenge of Adult Social Care with a focus
on prevention.
This is not an
inspection but an opportunity for a team of people who understand the pressures
of running local authority and health organisations to review our services in a
challenging but supportive way we can learn and improve from.
The approach involves the
submission of an evidenced self-assessment and an independent case audit, both
of which have been completed.
The case
audit report concluded the cases audited all pointed to services which are
safe, of high quality, and which resulted in good outcomes for people, before
highlighting strengths and making observations that might help us in further improving our practice.
While the provision of residential and personal care services
is regulated and inspected by the Care Quality Commission, there has been no
external assessment of care management or commissioning services since 2010,
although inspection could be reintroduced in the future.
This is an important opportunity, therefore, for us to get an
external view of how we are progressing and what we need to improve adult
social care and related services further. We have chosen to focus on prevention
because it is an important new duty the Care Act requires us to fulfil.
The Peer Challenge will inform our own review of our social care
reablement and community enabling services. It will also help us as we work
together across the council and with partners to finalise and implement a
prevention strategy to enable people to live as independently as possible for
as long as possible.
What's involved?
The Peer Challenge also involves
four days of onsite activity – interviews, focus groups, attendance at meetings
and observation of practice – which will take place from Tuesday 16 June to Friday 19 June.
Some of you will be involved in
various ways and those being interviewed,
organising offsite visits or meetings which peers are attending have received
further briefing. Thanks to everyone involved
for their support with this work.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and
Thursday of this week we’ll send an email to those staff who receive the adult
social care newsletter updating them of the day’s events. Please feel free to cascade this to colleagues as
appropriate.
On the afternoon of Friday 19 June we will receive initial feedback and will aim to write to you then to give you the
headlines.
We will then receive and agree a
written report which we’ll publish in July. We will also publish our resulting
action plan when completed. We will send
you links to copies of both.
You can find out more
information about the Peer Challenge on our website.
Kind regards
Jennie and Stuart
| 
