What’s Going On in Adult Social Services?
Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of meetings in order to organise a major restructure and transform the way services are delivered to the public. So far we have been consulted on the general outline as to the future model of the care management end of the service. We had a good attendance in August at the UNISON meeting which resulted in a statement being put out from UNISON to the first stage consultation.
The next stage is proving trickier. Workshops looking at the way a member of the public would get an assessment and what kind of support would be needed from individual social work/ OT teams… (In other words: Who does what when and for how long)… has predictably proven to be less straightforward. Draft Job Profiles are about to be shown to the union and we will be consulting closely with staff members about these to make sure some of the disgraceful exploitation of staff and their goodwill does not continue.
What is the Future Shape of Adult Social Services?
The commissioning side of our service is being increased. Consultations around this service are still ongoing, although the bulk of the consultation has been dealt with. Even before the economic crisis we had discussed the sense of having in-house services to guarantee service delivery. Given the facts that banks have come crashing down bringing some businesses with them and the fact we know already some providers of home care are struggling to find home careworkers to cover the West of the borough we think it makes all the more sense to have in-house provision. We will be taking this up with the Commissioning team.
There have been no statements from the senior management team to say there is no intention to outsource the social work side of Social Services to date. We have asked for them and so far…