West unitary adult social care boss ‘confident’ authority will be graded as good
The Care Quality Commission has started an assessment of how well the west unitary delivers adult social care
By Sarah Ward
The outgoing adult social care boss at West Northants unitary says he is confident the authority will be classed as good by the Care Quality Commission.
Last week the CQC informed the authority it would be beginning its assessment of the authority, which will involve a site visit within the next six months and a check of how the authority is delivering its adult social care.
The department is the biggest area the authority manages, and is the costliest, with an annual budget of £130m, to help the 4,000 people using the service.
The current director of adult social services Stuart Lackenby will be leaving the council to go to Birmingham City Council next month, but says the Northants authority currently considers itself as good.
At a scrutiny committee meeting held yesterday at One Angel Square, he said:
“We really feel this is our opportunity to shine. This is our opportunity to convey not that we’re perfect, but that we’ve delivered a significant amount of change for local people; that we have used this opportunity to reflect the work that our social workers, our care workers, do on a day to day basis, seven days a week. We very much believe and have assessed ourselves as being a good authority and in that sense our expectation is to convey to the CQC that if they came in two years time we would be an outstanding authority.
“We recognise that since the creation of the council, we at that point were probably a requires improvement authority, but if you look at the different things we’ve taken forward we’re confident in our position as a good authority.”
Questioned by chair of the committee, Conservative cllr Nick Sturges-Alex why he thinks the authority will be assessed as good, Stuart Lackenby said:
“The CQC are particularly interested in certain data. So one is around the number of people waiting for care. We don’t have anybody waiting for care. We used to. Two years ago we had about 2,000 hours worth of home care that we couldnt provide, particularly in our rural areas. So the work we’ve done from a commissioning perspective has meant that we have got sufficient provision across the totality of West Northants. So that’s one reason we think we’re in a good position.”
He qualified later in the meeting that his comments about no-one waiting for care related to people who had been assessed as needing care and not those waiting to be assessed.
He said compared to East Midlands comparator councils the authority was in a good position for waiting lists for assessments and for deprivation of liberty orders. He also said that any investigations regarding safeguarding concerns were a priority and were allocated straight away for investigation.
However currently a third of the indicators the department assesses itself on are rated as red, which means they are an area of concern. This includes the referral response rate; how long people are waiting discharge in hospital and how quickly finance assessments are done.
When questioned by Liberal Democrat councillor Rosie Humphreys about the areas of concern, the director said the red rating showed the authority was setting itself challenging targets.
He said:
“The notion of our indicators going red means that everybody is conscious that there is work to do to improve that particular indicator. So when we look at this, I would be more concerned if everything was green, because that would kind of give a sense of complacency that we’re not striving for improvement.”
Labour cllr Emma Roberts said there was a lot of emphasis on improvements being made through the Local Area Partnerships (LAPs) - a group of organisations focusing on health and wellbeing for a small area of around 30,000 people - but she said in her view they had failed.
She said:
“In my area they have not delivered what I had wanted them to deliver.”
Stuart Lackenby said the LAPS had not fully delivered as expected and would need to be relaunched after the May elections. He said more money would have to be allocated to the work of the LAPs. He also said the Labour government’s new about scrapping NHS England had involved Integrated care boards having to reduce their costs by fifty per cent by December and said:
“The only way they are going to do that is to merge into great big health authorities, or they need to delegate functions to local authorities.”
He said the creation of the LAPs would help them do this delegation.
Independent cllr Julie Davenport said she had noticed a vast improvement of adult social care under West Northants compared to the previous county council. She said she was not getting as many complaints as she used to, although she does still get complaints about respite care. An officer said there was not enough respite, due to the facility being in Corby and it being removed due to refurbishment. He said there are now two respite companies and five other private firms were developing facilities.
The authority now has a couple of weeks to gather the data to send to the CQC and must also identify 50 cases which the watchdog could look at. It will be in the autumn when the CQC makes its final assessment. The north unitary is also going through a similar CQC process.