Cabinet Member for Health and Adult Social Care Briefing Note

Department / Adult Social Care
From / Mike Boyle
Director for Adult Social Care Commissioning and Enterprise
To / Councillor Lukey, Cabinet Member Health and Adult Social Care
Date / 8 December 2016
Purpose / To give an update on the mobilisation and general situation of the homecare contracts
  1. Update on mobilisation and current situation

1.1The three new home care providersin Hammersmith and Fulham(LBHF) -MiHomecare,Castlerock Group, (CRG)and Sagecarehave continued to work with contracts and operations staff to implement the mobilisation plan.

1.2The contracts are now 85% mobilised in Hammersmith and Fulham, and all transfers are expected to be completed by the end of January 2017. At this stage, it is anticipated that up to 40% of customers will choose to take a Direct Payment and remain with their incumbent provider, but the final figure won’t be known until the end of the process.

1.3Monthly Contract Monitoring meetingshave now commenced replacing the previousimplementation meetings. Providers are now being asked to provide performance information to the Council on a weekly basis.

1.4In November 2016, there have been 8 refusals of new packages and 6 of them were from Sagecare and 2 from CRG. These indicators are monitored monthly.

1.5There have been 44 complaints since April 2016, breakdown below. Please note, this figure is the total formal complaints received and not broken down by substantitated / unsubstantiated. See Table 1 below. We will have sufficent complaints data to analyse the trends and offer training and support to providers in areas that require improvements.

1.6For all the providers the number of complaints increased from the first quarter, Q1 (April - June) to the second quarter, Q2 (July - September). Collectively, the increase was from 7 (Q1) to 21 (Q2). Individually, for CRG this was from 4 to 6; for MiHomecare, from 2 to 8, and for Sage, from 1 to 7.

1.7Into the third quarter, in Oct and Nov, Q3, there are zero number of complaints for CRG. MiHomecare and Sage have 6 and 10. Neither improved from Oct to Nov.

Table 1Number of Complaints by Month

Name of Home Care Agency / Apr / May / Jun / Jul / Aug / Sep / Oct / Nov / Grand Total
CRG / 2 / 0 / 2 / 3 / 3 / 0 / 0 / 0 / 10
MiHomecare / 0 / 2 / 0 / 2 / 3 / 3 / 3 / 3 / 16
Sage / 0 / 1 / 0 / 2 / 2 / 3 / 5 / 5 / 18
Total / 2 / 3 / 2 / 7 / 8 / 6 / 8 / 8 / 44

1.8In terms of the types of issues raised as complaints, the greatest proportion is in relation to the quality of service (46%), followed by service failures (32%). The other notable issues are service delays (11%) and staff attitude (9%), while communication is the least complained about issue (2%).

Table 2 Types of Complaint Issues

Name of Home Care Agency / Communication / Quality of service / Service Delay / Service Failure / Staff attitude/
behaviour / Withdrawal/
Reduction
CRG / 0 / 5 / 1 / 3 / 1 / 0
MiHomecare / 1 / 7 / 0 / 7 / 1 / 0
Sage / 0 / 8 / 4 / 4 / 2 / 0
Total / 1 / 20 / 5 / 14 / 4 / 0

1.9The year-to-date number of Safeguarding concerns are: 18; 4, 4 and 10 for CRG, MiHomecare and Sagerespecively. In October, CRG had 2 cases, MiHomecare had zero, and Sage had 1. However, there are communication issues around the coordination of cases, as some providers have raised issues about not being notified of cases. Therefore, reporting accurately is still a challenge. In November, only 1 safeguarding concern was raised against Sage, for alleged financial abuse.

Table 3Number of Safeguarding Concerns Raised

Name of Home Care Agency / Apr-2016 / May-2016 / Jun-2016 / July-2016 / Aug-2016 / Sep-2016 / Oct-2016 / Nov-2016 / Current Total
CRG / 0 / 1 / 1 / 0 / 0 / 0 / 2 / 0 / 4
MiHomecare / 0 / 0 / 2 / 0 / 0 / 2 / 0 / 0 / 4
Sage / 1 / 0 / 2 / 3 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 10
Total / 1 / 1 / 5 / 3 / 1 / 3 / 3 / 1 / 18

2Next steps and wider work

2.1Contract officers will continue to meet with providers and staff from operations staff, Contracts and Commissioning and Home Care Management Team (HCMT) monthlyduring the final mobilisation stage. In addition to the above, when required these meetings will also be attended by Complaints, Safeguarding and Business Intelligence colleagues.

2.2Workforce Development are working with providers and Adult Social Care staff have commenced regular sessions to present and share information on different topics relevant to the service specification and delivery. This isdesigned to continue the process of strengthening the partnership approach with shared learning and development of good practice. An initial meeting was held in May 2016, and a further session was held in June 2016on adopting a reabling approach to care, an expectation of the new ways of working. The next session will continue to build on this theme.

2.3Work is also underway internally to look at how we move to commissioning for outcomes (rather than time and task service delivery). A customer outcome based support plan has been agreed, and there will now be processes set out for how this can be progressed, as well as how providers can feed back to us how they are working to help customers achieve their outcomes. Commissioning will be working with ASC Operations staff, the Home Care Management Team (HCMT), providers and customers as we start move to this very different way of service delivery over the coming months.

2.4A contract management framework will be established by the end of 2016, to enable regular monitoring against the Business Critical Measures in the service specification and other aspects of the contract including the providers being asked to self report on all aspects of the outputs/outcomes whichwill then be verified atthe monthly Contract Monitoring meetings.