Minutes of Meeting
Wednesday 18 January 2017
People who were there: Rachel Keeling (SFHT), Emma Denton (member), Tanya Hawthorn (rep/member), Teresa Faris (NF Mencap, parent/carer), Sue Bravington (You Trust, SAIL), Robert white (member), Richard Creighton (member), Martin Lenaerts (Parent/carer), William Baker (member), Yvonne Schneider (Dimensions), Sarah Roebuck (The You Trust, Hazelgrove), Liz Rolfs (Mencap New Forest), Tim Bryant (rep/member), Madeleine Durie (chair), Ophelia Matthias (Choices), Florence Garland (HCC), Sam Davenport (HCC)
Apologies: Kym Anderson, Jill Honeybun, Stuart Outterside, Kym, Becky
Minutes of the last meeting
Approved
and matters arising
Thank you to New Forest Mencap for hosting up in 2017.
Update on the LD adult services restructure: formal communication in February/March via all LIGs. professionals, service users and families will also receive information.
Suzie Bravington
Telephone: 0330 822 0282
3 different strands in the service to promote independence:
1 – referrals: currently via adult services (but will be accepting referrals from Hants Direct) – up to 26 weeks, 1:1 support
2 – Drop-in each week. As per leaflet. No appointment needed, just turn up. A team member will be able to help you with problems with housing, welfare benefits checks, managing your money, budgeting for daily living, getting in touch with health services, issues with drugs and alcohol, managing medication, finding a job, finding a training course, using telecare of assistive technology, finding things of interest in your area, meeting new people and finding friends.
Anyone can drop in including a carer.
3 – telephone support for the whole of Hampshire. The offices are based in Fareham and the service is managed by the You Trust
Some issues with Will’s service. There was some confusion and probably some cross communication. It was a long time ago when the service first started. Will did not have the best experience.
A new leaflet has been sent out with all the current drop-ins. The closest to New Milton is the Lymington drop-in at the Job centre, 2 sessions a week (the library was too busy and noisy). There was one in Lyndhurst but it has been closed as they did not have enough people using it. Please use the telephone number if the drop in is too far.
Partnership Board matters
1) Parent/carer rep
Teresa said that she is happy to be the parent/carer rep in the interim period (we will hold elections in the Spring/Summer). She will come to the Partnership Board on the 1st March. Rita and Albert will still come to the Board as guests/observers and they are still part of the Orange LIG.
2) LD plan review
A meeting was held at EII court on 4th January. Ophelia, Tim and Martin came. We need to see if new promises can be added but we also need to check if the old promises have been met (and if not, why). The promisers will need to self assess and rate themselves and we will check (at the LIG) the assessment. There is quite a lot of work to do.
We agreed that Liz, Martin and Richard would be reps for the LD plan review. Tim said “no, thanks”.
For next month, we need to think about:
· What new promises would you like to be included in the Learning Disability Plan?
· What would you like the Plan format to look like?
· Has the LD plan made a difference to your life? (give examples)
Feedback latest by the 17 February. Ophelia is talking to her groups as well. This information is for the Partnership Board to be held on the 1st March.
The “support” topic will be postponed to the next Partnership Board June.
Transforming Care Partnership (Year 2) – Martin Lenearts
A big informative meeting with about 60 people was held at the Holiday Inn in Eastleigh last week. There are many projects within Hampshire including:
· Getting 68 people out of hospital (3 of them have been there for over 15 years!). 8 have been discharged so far.
· 46 people with personal health budget (we need a lot more)
· PA role (and a good video with Caroline and Claire) – PAs need to be paid appropriately if we want to retain them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZlP_BKp2ms
· Housing provision
· Support in hospitals
· Developing services to support better people with the law and the police
· Annual health checks – some issues in some areas/surgeries
· GP friendly surgeries
We also talked about autism and funding in general. Sometimes 1 year funding is not enough for big project and the money should not be pulled out after the first year.
We talked about emergency response and emotional support for people living and working with LD.
We talked about things that could be implemented easily but sometimes due to lack of funding, it can’t.
We also heard of MOOC which is an huge on-line learning project. It is for anyone who wants to learn something.
http://mooc.org/
We will talk about annual health checks next month at our LIG meeting. Any feedback would be useful. Flo has invited Kym Anderson to the meeting.
T17 update from Sam Davenport
We know of the changes in adult services, from April 2017.
Communication: we will have further information about the Adult services restructure in February/March with formal central correspondence to service users, families and providers. The LIGs are also to be kept informed.
Adults services are working on an operational level as well as governance level to make sure we do the right things.
Different streams to the project for example:
· Accommodation with Jenny Dixon/Laura Timms. We hope to get really good and adaptable accommodation for people with Learning Disabilities in Hampshire and we would like some good stories. It is important to have good local housing for people with learning disabilities. It takes a long time to get people on board.
· Transition (independent futures team) with Laura Dixon. Working for a smoother transition between children services and adults, not just to be ready at 18 but when you are ready to move.
· External day services with Lizzie Meager. With new specifications for day services and questionnaires. There are currently no CQC checks so it is important that services are checked in Hampshire. Lizzie is also reviewing people.
Anything else:
Richard would like an assessment for moving home. It is taking too long.
Message from Kym: Lyndhurst Practice and Solent and Waterside are now part of the LD Friendly project and Louise Osborne and Kym are booked in to meet with them to develop their action plans.
Flo has emailed Tony (for Teresa) – no news as from 23.1.2017
Dates: 2017 (The Nedderman Centre, Marryat Road New Milton, BH25 5NY)
15 February
22 March
26 April
24 May
21 June
19 July
None in August
20 September
18 October
22 November
13 December
Connect to Support:
Feedback as discussed today. Copied pasted from Flo’s email.
This project is on going so things are moving on/changing all the time. Please keep feeding information with the “feedback button”.
Were there some glitches on the website two or three weeks ago?
Two providers could not access the website and found it confusing. In the end, they left the website and did not go back to it. Something to do with “the village” setting.
There have been occasional problems with the site when changes have been made, and one time some search bars weren’t on screen for an hour or two and searches were not working. I’m not aware of any issues with the village, but if anyone has more details we’ll be happy to check. Most likely this has already been noticed and fixed.
Our suppliers are very quick to fix problems when people find them, and in late November we introduced a better way of making changes which should lead to fewer problems when changes to the site are made.
You cannot put your postcode to check the care providers. Post codes are quite useful when you want something local.
It is true that you can’t enter your postcode to check care providers. You can see what is available in your district, but providers often have very detailed information about the areas covered and don’t tell us when things change, so we recommend speaking to them about their service coverage when asking about the service. Maintaining that level of detail about ever-changing services takes a lot of time and effort.
In order that people can search on care provider information in Connect to Support Hampshire, Providers are asked to give information based on the district area they cover. Provider postcodes can be national and outside the county and often their office is not in the area where they provide their service.
We are considering various methods of searching and linking location information for the future, and we want to give the best searches possible, but this is a big development which is not a priority at the moment and could be difficult to implement. It may become a higher priority if we implement an online marketplace directly selling services when providers may be keener to update their information.
Things need to be more localised; this needs fine tuning please. if you ask for activities in one area, you get everything not just LD.
There are a number of factors here, and we discuss this balance regularly within our Team.
Producing search results is complex in the background of the website, and for now we have made the decision that search results are district or borough based – adding more detail and filtering options means that more listings that might be useful in the wider area might not show up as results at all.
Not wanting to restrict services too much is also a factor with “tagging” services as LD – the search is designed for all Hampshire residents, and those with LD may benefit from listings (e.g. groups, meetings) which are not just for LD, or LD groups. The site is designed to give a wider range of options in line with the strengths-based approach.
It’s also worth noting that adding tags is a difficult and labour-intensive process, and we would have to be absolutely certain this would improve the website before doing this.
As a workaround you can put the town/village name into the search bar and if there is an address in that area the listing will show up. That will show everything in the location you’ve entered (unfortunately including head offices where there isn’t actually a service available), and you can then filter those results further by ticking the category boxes at the side of the page.
It is still too complicated for people with learning disabilities to access.
We are looking to make the site as user-friendly for all Hampshire residents as possible, and encourage feedback, especially around searching.
We are limited in what we can do by the way the site search works and because there are four separate databases of information which means the results for the whole site are displayed separately for Information, for Community Directory signposting, Care Homes, and Care in the Home. This guarantees there will be separate areas for results, which can be confusing. However at the moment putting everything in one place slows the search results too much. We are discussing ways to improve this in the longer term.
We are also looking at how we can provide easy read pages for the specific areas of information which may be of interest to LD users in the future.
Janet is asking also if the comments taken from her group (GO-ld) have been taken on board. They have had no feedback. I think it was from the summer.
I’m not sure which particular comments Janet is referring to, but all new comments submitted through the feedback buttons on the site are compiled and discussed on a weekly basis.
We have provided feedback on all comments submitted through the site since it went live where people have requested a response. All comments provided before that were discussed as part of the “Go Live” process prior to July 2016, and people may have not had individual feedback from those due to the large numbers of comments we received. We’d encourage people to provide feedback which they feel hasn’t been considered from before July again, using the buttons on the website.
Some people are keen to have a really good version of “What’s on this week?” like in Parents Voice, where you have everything which is going on the week for people with ld.
We agree that Events and Calendaring and “What’s On” would improve Connect to Support Hampshire. At the moment the way the site is set up isn’t designed to do this very well. We are talking to the web supplier about our options to hugely improve the Events view, and we are also talking to the wider Hampshire Council website team to see if their new system has anything we could use, as well as speaking to Hart District about a pilot to see if a more regional and local events tool might be possible.
As with the community and voluntary directory, getting the information into the system and showing it in a useful way is the difficult part, but this is something we’re looking to improve. (note: we understand this is part of phase 2)
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