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Welcome to the 2018/19

Local Account for adult social care.

This is Dudley Council’s annual report of our adult social care work over the past year. Here we provide an overview of our progress over the year and outline what we intend to do in the coming year to continue improving our services for local people.

Doing things differently once again

Following on from last year’s local account, we have continued with a fresh approach. Once again we have worked with local people to make sure our report is understandable and meaningful to our borough residents. Again we have made our local account an online report that is more accessible and less ‘wordy.’ Also again we have developed a series of short videos working in partnership with community reporters from The People’s Network and Healthwatch Dudley. These videos feature council service leads, as well as local people who use adult social care services, these show real people’s experience of using real services.

 

We hope that this approach will mean that more people read the report and understand the work that is taking place. 

 

The support of local people from volunteer group The People’s Network has been a vital part of this year’s local account once again. A group of volunteers has formed the Local Account Reference Group, giving up their time and sharing their ideas and experience. The group take on the role of community reporters.  They worked to develop questions for the service leads and people using services and then worked with a local film maker to develop the series of videos. These give a real flavour of what is happening locally, hopefully making the report more relevant and meaningful to local people. Overall our aim has been to really get local people fully involved and engaged in both producing and reading the local account.

 

It is important to once again acknowledge the contribution of Dudley Healthwatch, which has been vital to the development of this year’s local account, both in enabling local people to get involved and fully engaged but also in championing the need to make public documents accessible and relevant to local people.

Our Key Values are:

By being accountable for everything we do and being transparent and open about why we do it

Accountability

By being determined to get it right for our residents

Determination

By listening to and empowering residents and staff and by acting with respect in everything we do

Empowerment and respect

By striving for excellence in everything we do

Excellence

By communicating clearly and reducing bureaucracy

Simplicity

By collaborating as one council and one borough

Working together

Our achievements

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Our priority in delivering adult social care services remains to support people to live safely, independently and as happily and healthily as possible throughout their lives. This will always be our core objective in delivering any kind of adult social care. Challenges will always face us and we will work to meet our core objectives despite these.

Just some of what we consider to have been our key achievements within adult social care over the past year are listed here and we very proud of these:

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  • The Assessment and Independence service was awarded a silver IESE ( the public sector transformation partner) award for reduction of delayed transfers of care

  • Over 97% of people we surveyed who had been through our safeguarding process had their desired outcome achieved

  • A new approach to care provided to people at home called single handed care which provides equipment to help people be more active and reduces care to a single person has proved to be very successful

  • Dudley Falls Prevention is working well and has reduced people’s secondary falls significantly

  • A pioneering scams unit, working as part of trading standards has been set up to protect people at risk of financial exploitation

  • The new Dudley Disability Service was officially launched and is now improving care for people with disabilities  through a whole life service

 

We were also recognised for managing our finances and resources effectively:

 

  • Our medium term financial strategy for 2018-19 was delivered in full contributing over £1m to the ongoing viability of services

  • A replacement adult social  care computer system is being rolled out without the need for any increased funding

  • We’ve had excellent feedback from local people about the quality of services provided including improved satisfaction ratings in both a carers survey and safeguarding feedback.

 

Our feedback and monitoring data and evidence shows that:

  • More people are making use of our information and signposting services

  • More people are saying that our adult social care services are supporting an improved quality of life

  • We are achieving a closer integration of health and social care to meet people’s needs. This will continue to be further developed through the Better Care Fund work, Vanguard programme work and Transforming Care for People with Learning Disabilities and/or autism programme

  • An increase in the number of people being supported locally within their own communities

  • More people using flexible personal budgets to meet their long term care needs in the community meeting their needs in the way they want

  • Less people needing to be admitted into long term residential or nursing home care homes

  • Increasing numbers of people successfully regaining their independence at home following an illness or hospital stay after receiving reablement support and using assistive technology (telecare gadgets and devices ) to stay safe and independent at home

  • The creation of stronger safeguarding arrangements targeting Dudley Borough’s most vulnerable people

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Challenges going forward

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We have faced some difficult challenges throughout the year, some of these we have been able to tackle successfully, others however remain. These continue to be our challenges, going forward and include:

 

  • The impact of the living wage and ensuring adult social care provider organisations are able to meet their statutory requirements. Specific areas of concern are residential care providers, home care providers and complex dementia care providers

  • Pressures on our preventative services and  mainstream social care services as a consequence of ongoing demographic pressures – people living longer, more people with dementia and more people with complex conditions

  • Ensuring a greater proportion of good and outstanding social care provision in the independent sector

  • The need to ensure strong safeguarding practices that place victims at its heart

  • The need to reduce demand for high intensity, long-term care – both residential and at home care, with associated loss of choice and control for local people.

  • The aim to reduce avoidable admissions into hospital by developing better community-based prevention and care and support services.

  • The loneliness epidemic which has been identified and the real  need to reduce the numbers of local people who feel lonely and isolated

 

Progress against last year’s challenges

In this report you will find details of the progress that we have made so far in tackling the challenges we listed in last year’s report, along with other challenges we have identified. Specific challenges we pinpointed last year included:

 

  • To improve information sharing

  • To improve support for carers so that carers don’t fall into crisis

  • To ensure people feel safer where they live

  • To ensure people are more in control of their care and support

 

In response to these key challenges, we have:

  • Fully updated our council website, leaflets and public information to be compliant with national information standards and easier to understand

  • Dudley Carers Hub was launched in summer 2018. It offers a range of services to support unpaid carers, caring for a family member of friend. In addition a new preventative home based replacement care (sitting) service for carers is being piloted which aims to support carers to maintain their own health and wellbeing and support them in their caring role

  • A new safeguarding hub has been introduced to improve the safeguarding response for children, young people and vulnerable adults.  The Dudley multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) brings together key professionals from organisations across the borough, including the council, police, probation, NHS and the voluntary sector

  • The proportion of people using our service saying they feel ‘in control’ has increased

 

We hope you find the report of interest and are pleased to see the good work being undertaken by our adult social care teams across Dudley Borough.

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Matt Bowsher

Signed by Matt Bowsher

Nicholas-Barlow.jpg

Signed by Cllr Barlow

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