Social care re-script

What we did

Doncaster Council has re-defined the SDS pathway for people needing social care support across the FACs spectrum. The review was endorsed by the leadership and led by the change and improvement team who worked closely with practitioners and operational managers, commissioners and other key staff. Engagement took place with users to produce a vision for SDS which was then developed over time as the work progressed. Existing business processes were mapped ('as is') and revamped.

Why we did it

This work started out following a review of the implementation of personal budgets in Doncaster, informed by TLAP's recommendations for developing lean systems and processes and the development of a local e-market place for social care. The aims were to:

• Increase uptake of direct payments
• Improve timeliness of assessments
• Radically reduce the number of people involved from end to end in the care planning cycle and to streamline the process
• Move to a system where personalization is implemented and embedded with integrity

Outcome

The new system is to be tested between October 2013 and March 2014 prior to full roll out. Expected improvements include:

• Radically overhauled SAQ- move to capturing a strengths based conversation where the practitioner clearly undertakes an evidence based community care assessment, applies FACS, explores aspirations and helps the citizen identify the strengths, skills and abilities and circles/networks of support they can harness to help them reinforce their resilience
• Outcomes based RAS where the practitioner uses their judgement based on the conversation to allocate resources to the outcomes identified together with the citizen that remain FACs eligible and unmet, following exploration of circles of support and strengths
• An indicative budget is then produced, and agreement reached between citizen and social care worker this is adequate
• An agreement about money management and support planning with a presumption that the user will take a Direct Payment through a variety of deployment options and develop their own support plan given direction to appropriate tools, either on their own, with a family member, with peer support or through accessing a paid skilled support planner
• At this stage, if the citizen and social care worker agree some straightforward commonsense supports, spend can commence, back office triggered to initiate payment
• Citizen lives life and develops plan, refining budget
• Social Care worker reviews at six weeks, plan signed off. Review period set according to risk judgement of social care worker to balance empowerment of choice and control against risk to the public purse
• Social care worker reviews to include light touch audit - discussion revisiting outcomes plan and spend to.

Contact details