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Chapter 1 Summary, evaluations and recommendations
Summary
The inspection found that East Dunbartonshire had come a long way from their early days as an authority. Social work had built up a wide range of services. They had improved staff recruitment and retention, and were engaging more effectively with stakeholders to develop and improve services. Partner agencies spoke very positively of their relationship with social work. While we found support for carer involvement to be well developed, managers recognised the need to increase user involvement in strategic planning.
The local authority had good community engagement processes through a number of forums and citizen panels. Social work had taken steps to develop services in consultation with communities of interest as well as local communities.
In key areas of child care we found that positive steps had been taken to increase the likelihood of good outcomes such as being nurtured and achieving potential. They needed to do better at providing quicker access to services for children with special needs.
Most people who used services agreed that they were of good quality and that staff treated them with dignity and respect. We considered that developments in adult care should be more focused on enabling people to live full and active lives, including more support into employment.
Both health and social work faced significant challenges in meeting the needs of increasing numbers of older people against a back-drop of a low level of service provision. There were promising signs of closer collaboration between partners to meet these challenges. Adults from some other care groups were waiting considerable times for services.
Staff enjoyed their work and were committed to delivering high quality services. The authority had given strong support to staff supervision and appraisal, and to staff training and continuous development. We saw fine examples of leadership by front-line staff and managers who were keen to champion further improvements to their services.
There was strong corporate and political support for social work as a whole. Child care had a higher strategic profile than community care, and effective inter-agency planning and working were more consistently evidenced. Criminal justice services contributed well to inter-authority partnership planning, and benefited from the systems and quality assurance measures established by the partnership.
A performance management culture was developing across the service. Managers needed to look very carefully at whether structures in community care in particular, lent themselves to achieving effective performance monitoring and driving development. Measures needed to be put in place to capture the learning from complaints and from customer feedback, to inform service planning and improvement.
Evaluations
Areas for evaluation | Evaluation |
|---|
Outcomes for people who use services | Adequate |
Impact on people who use services and other stakeholders | Good |
Impact on staff | Good |
Impact on the community | Good |
Delivery of key processes | Adequate |
Policy and service development, planning and performance Management | Adequate |
Management and support of staff | Good |
Resources and capacity building | Adequate |
Leadership and direction | Good |
Capacity for improvement | Good |
Recommendations
Impact on people who use services and other stakeholders
No recommendations.
Impact on staff
No recommendations.
Impact on the community
Recommendation 1
Managers should provide guidance and support to social workers to continually develop their knowledge of helping options to match the needs of service users and carers they are asked to assess.
Delivery of key processes
Recommendation 2
Social work should use planned changes to the advice and response service to form the basis of a wider review of duty arrangements. Partners should be consulted and involved as appropriate.
Recommendation 3
Social work should conduct a rigorous analysis of the reasons for long delays between first identification of need and the provision of services. An improvement action plan should follow.
Recommendation 4
Both child care and community care should examine and streamline current practice regarding assessment.
Recommendation 5
Social work should take action, alongside partner agencies, to review current adult protection arrangements with a particular emphasis on multi-agency training and collaborative working.
Recommendation 6
Social work should create a child-friendly and relaxed setting in a central location which could be used for interviews and reviews.
Policy and service development, planning and performance
Recommendation 7
Social work and its partners should review the capacity of the PPIGs to deliver on all three fronts of planning, implementation and performance. There should be attention to consistency in arrangements for stakeholder involvement.
Recommendation 8
East Dunbartonshire should review the priority it gives to older people's services and ensure there are sufficient resources to provide a range of support services to meet the needs of its most frail older citizens. Social work should sustain its efforts to improve its delivery of services for older people.
Recommendation 9
Steps should be taken by the local authority to develop more services to meet the needs of disabled children and their families. There should be an options appraisal which tests the possibilities of partnership ventures and builds on those partnership arrangements already in place. Families should be involved in this process.
Recommendation 10
East Dunbartonshire should strengthen its arrangements for quality assurance and improvement in social work, both in terms of resources and integration with the management of social work. It should ensure that the outcome of complaints is published and there are processes to ensure learning from complaints.
Management and support of staff
Recommendation 11
Social work should review whether staff resources are being deployed to optimum effect and what planning/development and quality assurance infrastructure is needed to support operational effectiveness and efficiency.
Resources and capacity building
Recommendation 12
Social work should move quickly to complete and implement their commissioning strategy. This should involve consultation with key stakeholders.
Leadership and direction
Recommendation 13
The Director of Community Services and the CSWO should pursue a higher strategic profile for community care services. They should have a higher corporate priority within the council. Senior managers should make sure that service plans include longer term social work priorities that are reflected in both corporate and community plans.
Recommendation 14
Managers should review their internal communication strategy to build on what they have already introduced and to ensure there is consistency of communication across all parts of the service.
Capacity for improvement
No recommendations.
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