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Adult Social Care Peer Challenge Week 16-19 June 2015
Dear colleague,
This morning we met with Maggie
Rae and Paul Clarke from the Peer Team to receive and discuss feedback on
the first day of the Peer Challenge.
They gave us positive feedback
that we appear to be a well led organisation, that knows its strengths and
areas for development, has positive plans to meet the challenges ahead, and has
staff who are positively engaged and keen to learn and improve. They
highlighted our approaches to change management and to professional leadership
and say that we could do better in promoting the many achievements of our
staff, and good news stories we have from those who use our services.
David Vitty from the Borough of
Poole (who carried out the independent case audit in May) returned to share his
findings with the Peer Team and our professional leads. He
reported services which are safe, of high quality and which resulted in good
outcomes for people with an efficient care pathway, person-centred case
recording, and good practice in social care reablement and community enabling.
He said we could act sooner in some instances of falls and self-neglect, make
better use of assistive technology, and more consistently signpost to services
in the voluntary sector.
Members of the Peer Team had a variety of opportunities over
the course of the day to speak to users of our services and carers about their
experiences. They said carers raised concerns about the change in services to
them, from being an open access model to one requiring assessment of need and
means under the Care Act. And asked whether our approach is proportionate,
something we are already following up on.
More generally, the Peer
Team think there are opportunities for us as a
council to further improve how we work together across the council and
with our partners on, for example, our approach to prevention.
Today, members of the Peer Team are visiting services all over Devon
as part of their timetable:
- They are seeking to better understand our care pathway
and model of integrated operational delivery by spending time in the
Customer Service Centre in Tiverton, and Care Direct Plus and a Complex
Care Team in Exeter.
- They are looking at how we work with the voluntary
sector in South Devon with visits to the Community Hospital, the Library
and the Rushbrook Centre in Totnes in the morning and then the Community
Hospital and Care Direct Plus centre in the afternoon.
- They are accompanying staff from the Social Care
Reablement Team in Barnstaple on some home visits and speaking to managers
about plans for the service, before spending the afternoon at a care home
with members of the Quality Assurance and Improvement Team and NHS
colleagues to better understand how we work together with providers to
improve the services we commission.
- They are also exploring how we manage change by
attending various scheduled meetings at County Hall focused on the
implementation of the Care Act: the Staff Reference Group; the Prevention
Workstream; and the Care Act Board.
Organisationally, all is going
smoothly, so thank you if you have been involved so far. If your team is being
visited, we have much to be proud of in Devon and you should promote that and
your contribution to it, while also being ready to listen to and learn from the
wisdom of those engaged in meeting similar challenges elsewhere in the country.
We will continue to update you
every day this week on the activity of the Peer Team and the feedback we receive from
them.
Kind regards,
Jennie
 Strategic Director People
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