SCIE reports on its roundtable event on leadership and the Care Act…
The press release described it as “Messages from the frontline. Report from SCIE’s Roundtable event on leadership and the Care Act”.
The topic might seem obscure, complicated, abstract, and probably even irrelevant to family and other carers. And as Professor Martin Green, Chief Executive of Care England said “I’ve never heard a service user say to me ‘My real concern is the management structure’. What they are concerned about is the delivery of the service.”
But the attendees were all significant figures in the care sector, who will influence how the Care Act will be implemented. The dominant themes were the need for change and improvement, and the challenge of achieving these in an era of ongoing austerity.
Key conclusions on the challenges and opportunities faced were:
- Demographic changes, funding challenges and increasing demand all imply that we cannot plan, commission or deliver care and support in the same way as we have in the past.
- Delivering joined up care is also complex in a fragmented, increasingly pluralistic system with multiple players.
- Preventative approaches require looking at the system more broadly than just health and social care to include, for example, transport, leisure and employment services.
- There are vested interests that will challenge the need to share power with different parts of the system – including with people who use services and carers.
- Policymakers seem to start with a top-down approach, and then as their term in office comes to an end, they realise it does not work. We have to start with a bottom-up approach.
The roundtable event was chaired by Lord Michael Bichard of the Social Care Institute for Excellence, and the invited speakers were:
Baroness Sally Greengross, Crossbench Peer, House of Lords
David Pearson, President, Association of Directors of Adult Social Services
Professor Martin Green, Chief Executive, Care England
Sharon Allen, Chief Executive, Skills for Care and National Skills Academy for Social Care
If nothing else, it is worth reading the words of these four speakers to get a overview of where care provision is headed in the coming years (or of where it should be headed).
Sharon Allen for example stated: “Systems leadership is needed at every level because the definition of wellbeing in the Care Act goes well beyond social care and health – it talks about work, education, recreation and housing. Can any one of us say that we can, on our own, address all of those needs? We need to work together, recognising each other’s responsibilities.”; but she admitted “It is fantastic that we have legislation that talks about personalisation. It will become common parlance, but it also has to translate into what we actually do. It means we need to engage all parts of the system in this language. There is no point in strategic leads using ‘personalisation’ and ‘co-production’. Social workers, care staff, occupational therapists and others – they need to understand what we are trying to get at. At present we are not engaging them in the programme.”
Read the SCIE press release here , and view the report as a PDF here