Leadership
This theme is about how we ensure we appropriately manage our support and services, ensuring that we are always learning and improving.
Governance, management and sustainability
Performance matters
In Adult Social Care we believe performance management is everybody’s business and we seek to understand how well our services are doing, checking impact, outcomes, and learning from what we find to guide the development of our services.
We need to ensure all our staff are clear in their responsibilities for performance management and quality, as we recognise we are publicly accountable for quality, performance and the need to be transparent on how we can work together to improve outcomes for adults and their carers. This approach includes regular performance reporting and analysis of information and data. Performance data which focuses on critical areas and ensures there are no gaps in our understanding of how we are operating. Some of this data and analysis can be found earlier in the Annual Report on pages 10 to 14.
Through the Performance and Insight Team we have developed data and information dashboards to enable accessible and accurate data and information to be produced which can be used by staff and managers. These are utilised to inform planning and how we use resources. Our approach to approach is underpinned by policies, standards and guidance which together support the design and delivery of effective services. These include national performance frameworks (Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework - ASCOF), statutory information returns, local policies, procedures and standards.
National indicators include a need to focus on enhancing the quality of life for people with care and support needs, delaying and reducing the need for care and support, ensuring that people have a positive experience of care and support, and that people are safe
We identified from our surveys that people said they found it hard to find information about Adult Social Care which led to us reviewing how we provide information.
This included work on our webpages to make them more accessible. We looked at other local authorities' web pages, who was accessing what information on our existing webpages and undertook an engagement exercise with people to look at web pages. This led to us to updating our webpages and developing and updating our public information leaflets.
In the annual survey for people with care and support needs in 2022/23, we saw an improvement in responses about how easy is it to find information, Unfortunately, in the survey for 2023/24 this decreased so we are thinking again what we can do, with ideas about targeting specific information to those in receipt of elements of care such as home supporting the form of an information pack. In terms of provision of information and advice for carers, our survey responses for 2023/24 indicates that people find it relatively easy to find information related to support for unpaid carers.
Louise Ferro, Head of Business Systems and Improvement said:
Monitoring, evaluating and managing our performance is key to ensuring people receive the right support in the right way and at the right time. It is also vital for us to learn from feedback received and survey results to ensure when things aren't working as well as they should be act quickly to deliver improvement.
Learning, improving and innovation
Coproduction and engagement
Improvement through continuous learning is embedded within how we do our work but one of the most important ways we learn is by listening to, involving and engaging with those who have 'lived experience'. In Adult Social Care we place adults and their carers at the heart of everything we do. We are committed to ensuring that people with carer and support needs and their carers can be equal partners in planning and shaping future developments in Adult Social Care. But we know we've still got some way to go with this.
Behind the scenes we’ve been working hard to try and develop our own approach to co-production and ensuring that we are involving people in the development of services, something as simple as ensuring we get feedback along people’s journeys, to being part of recruitment decisions to helping shape and create new services. We have developed the ‘Engagement, Involvement and Co-Production Our Approach’, a document which outlines our key commitments to making this happen. We want to ensure that the involvement of people with care and support needs and carers becomes standard practice.
We have been looking at any barriers that might exist to involvement and have produced a policy for reimbursement of expenses and fees for participation. We are also continuing to seek feedback from people accessing our support via our Experience Survey which also asks if people want to receive more information about Adult Social Care and ‘get involved’, growing the group of people we can engage with. It also asks people for one change or improvement they would like to make to the support they have or are receiving. We read all of these, contact people if they need support and take action on any themes.
We want to continue to grow the number people who want to be involved and hear their views.
We produce regular bulletins or newsletters for people interested in Adult Social Care which includes updates on developments and details of forthcoming opportunities for getting involved. 1,368 people are receiving our Adults Bulletin and 3,673 people our Carers. If you want to be added to our newsletter circulation list, you can subscribe online
Where we have acted on feedback, we will share this on our webpages via a ‘We asked, you said, we did’ page.
We now have a live demographic dashboard which tells us who is accessing Adult Social Care compared to the city population and we are using this information to inform our approaches. We have updated all our public information which identifies that they can be made available in 6 main languages used in Coventry – Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic, Romanian and Tigrinya. We have also produced our safeguarding posters in these languages alongside specific information about safeguarding in Arabic as this is one of the most requested languages for translation and more recently our Direct Payments leaflets into Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic and Gujarati.
In 2022/23 we started to hold open days, inviting people to come and hear more about Adult Social Care and get involved. We have continued holding large events through 2023/24. This has included Bethel Church, Spon End and University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire (June 23), Cheylesmore Community centre (November 2023) and the Muslim Resource Centre (Health and Wellbeing Event February 2024).
Also ‘Pop ups’ as we like to call them. The pop-up events help us speak to a wide range of people, people that might not be receiving Adult Social Care, might not have heard of our support and people who self fund their care. We've made sure we have a wide range of staff, such as occupational therapists, social workers and always a popular one, the financial assessments team.
Pauline, a person with lived experience who is supporting our work in mental health services said about ‘getting involved’;
I have known Simon, the Manager of Adult Social Care, for many years. He was my social worker for a time, and I am certain of his intrinsic social work values. Life happened and we parted ways but a chance meeting at a bus stop brought us together again. We arranged to meet, and he told me he was keen to find someone who accesses services to be involved in the recruitment process for mental health professionals. I agreed as it is my belief that ‘service user’ involvement (coproduction) is essential in all aspects of the provision of services. My first assignment was to edit the mental health website. I then made a recruitment video describing my experience of receiving services.
For the past year I have been actively involved as part of the recruitment panel. I am a colleague and feel my opinion matters. Simon has given me the opportunity to do a presentation in the future to Approved Mental Health Professionals (AMHPs) in a teaching role. The possibilities for co-production in mental health is vast and as the coproduction movement grows, I hope to expand my role as an ‘Expert by Experience’ for mental health services.
What’s next and looking forward
We recognise that there is always more to do, and that learning is an ongoing process. We want to get people more involved in the commissioning of services and also ensure information gets to those who need it most.
June the group co-chair said:
I have been involved with the Stakeholder group since 2022, it is a friendly supportive group, people who attend have a wealth of knowledge and come from all different backgrounds which consists of people’s own personal experiences or those of people they are supporting or caring for, there are professional people and the voluntary groups that all contribute. We discuss up and coming service developments and improvements, where it gives us an opportunity to ask questions, have discussions and contribute on how services can help the people of Coventry.