HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

HEALTH AND ADULT CARE CABINET PANEL

WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2011 AT 2.00PM

ADULT SOCIAL CARE LOCAL ACCOUNT 2010/11

Report of the Director Health and Community Services

[Author: Iain MacBeath, Assistant Director Performance & Business Support, Tel:01992 556363]

Executive Member:Colette Wyatt-Lowe (Health and Adult Care)

1.Purpose of report

1.1.To present the 2010/11 ‘Local Account’ for Adult Social Care Services.

2.Summary

2.1.The Local Account for Social Care is a requirement of the new national performance framework for Adult Social Care, as laid out in the Department of Health’s report ‘Transparency in Outcomes: A Framework for Quality in Adult Social Care’. The Local Account outlines performance in 2010/11, areas of strength and innovation, areas for improvement, and plans for change and transformation.

3.Recommendation

3.1.The Panel is invited to note and comment onthe Local Account.

4.Background

4.1.In November 2010, the Council’s Adult Social Care Services were rated as ‘Excellent’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the highest rating available. This was the last time that CQC issued performance ratings on Adult Social Care departments.

4.2.In March 2011, the Department of Health published ‘Transparency in Outcomes: A Framework For Quality In Adult Social Care’. This document lays out a new approach to quality and outcomes in social care, and consequently complements the Department of Health’s major policy statement on adult social care, ‘A Vision For Adult Social Care: Capable Communities and Active Citizens’, published in 2011. The key elements of the vision are outlined overleaf:

  • Prevention: people and communities working together with services to help people stay independent for longer.
  • Personalisation: putting individuals in control of their own care, through universal access to information and a commitment to provide personal budgets to all eligible people who want them.
  • Partnership: different public, private and voluntary organisations coming together with individuals and communities to deliver care and support.
  • Plurality: matching the scope and variety of people’s needs with diverse service provision and a broad market of high quality providers.
  • Protection: securing sensible safeguards to protect the most vulnerable people from abuse or neglect
  • Productivity: greater local accountability to drive innovation to deliver more productive and higher quality services
  • People: the care and support workforce leading the changes on the ground, with the right skills, freedoms and support to do so.

5.The new framework for quality and outcomes

5.1.The central themes ‘Transparency in Outcomes: A Framework for Quality in Adult Social Care’ can be summarised as follows:

  • A focus on domains and outcomes for service users, not output indicators. The domains are:
  • Enhancing quality of life for people with care and support needs;
  • Delaying and reducing the need for care and support;
  • Ensuring that people have a positive experience of care and support;
  • Safeguarding adults whose circumstances make them vulnerable and protecting from avoidable harm.
  • A consolidated, and rationalised, National Data Set for adult social, which aims to measure the domains (and outcomes), outlined above as efficiently as possible, allowing for meaningful benchmarking.
  • A more transparentapproach to quality and outcomes in social care. Specifically, the paper sets out a commitment to “opening up information on adult social care, and fostering a new conversation between service providers, commissioners, and those they serve will together enable a new relationship where accountability is held locally, and citizens feel empowered to challenge – or to commend – local services”. Annual performance reports from the Care Quality Commission have consequently been replaced, by Local Accounts. Councils must produce a Local Account every year, which should outline the performance of their adult social care services, areas of strength and achievement and plans for improvement. They aim to help provide both transparency, but also accountability to local communities.

6.Local Account

6.1.The council’s first Local Account is attached at Appendix 1. It has been structured around the following themes:

  • Inform, advise, prevent
  • Recover, re-ablement, and rehabilitation
  • Personalised care and support
  • Working in partnership
  • Future plans

6.2.The Local Account will be published on the internet. It is proposed not to distribute printed copies of the report, unless there is a request from an individual or group for a printed copy if accessing an electronic copy is not possible.

7.Financial Implications

7.1There are no financial implications directly associated with this report.

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