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Joint Conference
Social Services North West and ADSS North West Branch
MAKING QUALITY COUNT
delivering the best to our service users and communities
Thursday 17 May 2001
10 am - 4 pm
Reebok Stadium, Bolton
CONFERENCE REPORT
Joint Reviews, performance indicators and targets, SSI inspections, the Performance Assessment Framework, Best
Value - never have the personal social services been under so much external scrutiny. And the Government's Quality
Strategy places a stringent set of expectations on local authority members and directors to achieve high quality
services.
Social Services North West is totally
committed to the pursuit of quality in the personal social services, and wishes to support its member authorities
in achieving continuous improvement.
This conference was designed to help both members and officers make sense of the raft of scrutiny mechanisms, and to develop communication with the various
agencies involved in administering them. From such understanding and dialogue, we can maximise the effectiveness
of the monitoring tools, and of the services themselves.
In opening the conference on behalf of Councillor Cliff Morris, Chair of Social Services North
West who was unavoidably detained elsewhere, Co-ordinator Peter
Hewitt said it was good once again to be able to
welcome so many members and officers from across the North West.
This showed the value to our member authorities of bringing top-line
national speakers to the region, then adding a local flavour to
those contributions by some inputs from amongst our own communities.
"In June last year," he went on, "the members of Social Services North West met to determine the work priorities for the next 12 months. Amongst the top four of these was the issue of Performance Assessment and Quality, which we are addressing today. We all know how important it is that our service users, carers and communities should receive the best possible service, and this organisation is totally committed to that.
"But the mechanisms for verifying this are more numerous and complex than ever before. But it is vitally important that we make sense of all these approaches, and ensure that they mesh together to produce benefits for those whom we serve.
"Our speakers today will shed light on
various aspects of this complex subject, and then in discussion we
shall have an opportunity to bring all the different elements
together, and try to make sense of the whole picture."
FIRST PRESENTATION: DEVELOPING SCIE -
THE SOCIAL CARE INSTITUTE FOR EXCELLENCE
Don Brand, Director of Policy and Workforce Development at the National Institute of Social Work, has a
key role in developing SCIE, which has a key role in the government's strategy to raise the quality of social care
provision. Its task will be to research and disseminate information to social care professionals about what methods
and services work best, and tackle current variations in care across the country. Don
first addressed the functions
envisaged for SCIE, and its relationships with the new framework of regulatory bodies - GSCC, NCSC and
TOPSS. He explained how SCIE fits into the Government's overall Quality Strategy, including the proposed "local quality
framework" and the lead role envisaged for members and directors in securing quality of service and
practice.
Click here to go to the full report of Don Brand's presentation
An additional resource from the conference is now available - a Prospectus on the Social Care Institute of Excellence (SCIE) by the Department of Health for a consultation workshop earlier in May 2001, provided to the conference by Don Brand
Click here to go to the
Department of Health Prospectus on SCIE
SECOND PRESENTATION: PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
AND JOINT REVIEWS
John Bolton is Review Director of the Joint Review Team at the Audit Commission. He has wide experience
in social services, latterly as assistant director with responsibility for quality and support services in Camden.
Joint Reviews provide an independent assessment of how well the public is being served by social services locally.
The reviews identify what authorities do well, and highlight those areas that could be improved. A rolling programme
is being carried out by a specialist national team, managed jointly by the Audit Commission and the Department
of Health's Social Services Inspectorate. John spoke of performance
management as the setting of objectives and measurement of
progress towards meeting them. Thus all managers know what is
required of them. Users and carers are at the centre of
service delivery, and the Joint Review team use data to make an
assessment of how well people are being served,
linking its methodology to the overall rating of performance of local social services authorities.
Click here to go to the full report of
John Bolton's presentation
THIRD PRESENTATION: MEASURING PERFORMANCE
AT THE HEALTH / SOCIAL CARE INTERFACE
Sue Lightup, Deputy Director at Bolton and currently on secondment to the North West Regional office of the
NHS Executive, spoke of the multi-disciplinary Regional Change
Agent team to which she and others had been seconded, to help with
'hot spots' and capacity problems and find and disseminate good
practice in Intermediate Care. She outlined the approach the
team had adopted and the model of intermediate care to which they
worked. Again, service users and their carers were at the
centre of their approach. She then examined the performance
management tools used in the NHS and in the joint arena with social
services, underlining the benefit of such joint working to the
eventual outcome.
Click here to go to the full report of
Sue Lightup's presentation
FINAL SESSION: INTEGRATING
PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT AND QUALITY
In the final session, Peter Hewitt, John Bolton and Sue Lightup were
joined on the panel by David Whyte, Deputy Director of Warrington
and Peter Munro, Social Care Group, SSI.
David Whyte, who heads the regional group of Performance Assessment leads, spoke of the various dimensions and indicators of quality which were being pursued within the region, including a benchmarking club and the Business Management Group. There had been much talk today of indicators today as if they were hard and clear-cut, but he warned of the need to attend to the 'wobbly indicators', which were often those of most concern to users and carers. It was the feelings they experienced, the choices they made, and the outcomes for them, which were the most important indicators of success.
Peter Munro spoke of four key roles of the Department of Health and colleagues in relation to performance assessment and quality:
- National targets /objectives /performance indicators
- Collecting /collating /disseminating statistics and other data
- External evaluation and inspection
- Annual Review Meeting
The overall task was to identify the strengths, the development needs and the capacity to improve within each authority. He felt optimistic about improvements both in the process of performance assessment, and in the performance of authorities themselves.
Key issues identified in the closing discussion were:
- the need to streamline data gathering and reduce bureaucratisation
- data needs to be accessible and usable to staff and users
- the challenges of securing valid stakeholder involvement and the role of independent advocacy
- the role of area and community forums in securing consumer feedback and challenging providers
- the need for people and their needs to predominate over institutions and buildings
- the need for enabling alternatives to traditional patterns of provision
The conference and the key action points will be reported to the next meeting of Social Services North West in June.
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