Connecting Services for a Connected Community

Author: Peter Tomlin, Director Adult Social Services, Adult Social Care, Health Integration and Wellbeing, City of Stoke on Trent Council

 

The challenges of responding to growing needs with less resources over time demands a different approach from Adult Social Care, one which relies on partnership and integration with our local residents, with health colleagues and a different relationship with our local communities. Key to this is understanding the aspirations of people who use our services as our job in Adult Social Care is to unlock the potential in everyone we work with, which starts with our passionate belief in every individual’s right to pursue possibilities, dreams and aspirations.  To enable the achievement of everyone’s full potential we will use our financial resources, the skills of our workforce and partnership with our local communities to help people make connections and build relationships in a way that improves wellbeing and fosters independence. We want everyone to be able to enjoy and contribute to community life.

We have made a start, through programmes such as Changing Futures and Communities Together and new service offers like the personal budgets we offer through Changing Futures, the MARG and our Community Lounges, with the Council enabling a range of partners to work with people offering a range of services in communities in the places that people are most comfortable with. But this is not fully embedded as a consistent offer across the city, and a sustainable, integrated offer as these services operate outside of our statutory responsibilities and therefore, our ongoing funding.

So whilst we are determined to improve the experiences of the residents we serve the council does not need to be the direct provider of services and a partnership approach is needed. Rather, we can develop the existing strong voluntary, community, charity, social enterprise and faith sector that already engages positively with many of our residents. It also means growing the capacity and capability of private care providers. This should be shaped around the reality of people’s lives, and so we will be working with organisations like expert citizens to enable us to provide excellent services to those who need it most.

The key to a longer term, more sustainable way of delivering this will be working with our health partners and public health professionals, developing a real identity of Stoke on Trent as a ‘place’, bringing health and social care together through an unwavering focus on health inequalities and population health management.  This identity as a ‘place’ is part of the integration white paper ‘Health and social care integration: joining up care for people, places and populations’ is co-terminus with the local authority boundaries, so for us this is the city, and offers a real opportunity to develop integrated ways of working on shared outcomes in Stoke-on-Trent.

We have a long way to go on this journey – the response of health and social care, indeed all public service organisations is too fragmented, expecting vulnerable people and their carers to join up services rather than doing it ourselves. We have not properly harnessed the power and reach of the business, voluntary, community and faith sectors. We have too often believed that the State has the solutions when far better solutions lie with communities themselves. We have an improvement plan that sets out how we will look outside of ourselves to improve the experience of our residents, and Changing Futures are a key part of these changes.

Key actions in the plan include how we will work in conjunction with the voluntary, community, charity, social enterprise and faith sector, to build the infrastructure to enable the sector to engage with communities and build the capacity to support people to access local services to meet the differing needs of those communities. We will work with you as frontline staff across the services to build the awareness of the community offer and have confidence in the support provided to tackle issues as an alternative to statutory intervention. We will develop a dedicated ASC front door team to work closely with the contact centre and other professions, working in a strength based, enabling way, focused on resolving issues and preventing progression to formal long term care, strengthening the role and ability to access enablement services to maximise independence. And we will focus on carer support as a priority to prevent carer breakdown.

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