My report to Council

Posted By: Dale Mulgrew
Date Posted: 23/07/2009

Thank you Mr Mayor for the opportunity to report to the Council the latest developments on various matters relating to the health and social care Portfolio.

Adult care

First Wave of individual budgets to be launched shortly:

Final preparations are underway to ensure that the first wave of individual budgets will be launched towards the end of the summer. A special transformation team has been assigned to this task. Currently there is a lot of engineering of the new processes required for personal budgets and this is involving a flurry of activities and gathering of intelligence from other local authorities. This is to ensure the support mechanisms that will underpin personal budgets are robustly put together, so that they can withstand the road testing of the first wave.

One of the new processes to be created is a self assessment questionnaire (SAQ), so that service users will be able to have a greater input into their assessments. We are also creating a fair resource allocation system.

Recently there has been a shift in the development work to recognise the role carers will inevitably play in the new world of personal budgets. I participated in a conference organised by the DoH in Manchester during the month of June, which placed an emphasis on the linkages between the self directed care agenda and carer’s issues. We will be having a special day to focus on this particular aspect of personal budgets for carers and how it will be incorporated into the Rochdale model at the end of July.

There will be a need for us to closely monitor how well this first wave of individual budgets gets implemented. We aim to have a small cohort of 25 service users who will be appointed an individual budget, taken from as many different client groups as possible. This is so that we will have an understanding of the issues appertaining to each group (whether it is older people, learning disability, mental health, or physical impairment); but there could be potential hurdles attributed to more generic administrative functions that may need overcoming.

Certainly we would want to avoid the progress of our neighbouring authority of Oldham, who, through a desire of expediency, rushed out their model and this has led to changes on several occasions to date. A progress report will be part of the report to the October Council.


Mental Health:

Rochdale MBC has recently been successful in a joint bid with Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust to take part in piloting the implementation of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) for Adults and to develop the necessary links between the NHS, Adult Care and Third Sector partners.
The Common Assessment Framework for Adults is a national initiative, which aims to develop clear protocols and processes that will enable the sharing of information between Health and Social Care, supported by information technology.
There will be a launch event hosted by both partners scheduled for the Middleton Arena at the beginning of August.


Domiciliary Care

Members will have been provided with a briefing note recently on the re-tendering exercise that is underway for all the council’s home support contracts.

This has been a very robust, transparent and highly professional process, which has followed corporate procurement guidelines. Unfortunately, the process has highlighted once more the inadequacy of the local market to fulfil our expectations on quality, as we strive to improve the home care services that the Council provides. As a result there will be a number of local providers who will not qualify for our preferred providers list.

There will be less disruption for service users, as many of the staff already present in the care economy in Rochdale will be required to fill vacancies when the preferred providers are introduced.

But already there is a sense of heightened optimism that this process will lead to a vastly improved outcome for the borough, as the qualities that have been requisite in the re-tendering are around competency, management, training, safety, adult safeguarding, and a commitment to work with our new e-monitoring system.

Carers resources

It is with a great deal of regret that the carers resource centre will have to be moved out of their home of the last few years, which was located in premises on Water Street.

This is an ongoing saga and it first surfaced eighteen months ago when the deterioration of the roof of the building was deemed unsustainable. As the council leases out three floors of the building from a property owner, it was thought an amicable solution could have been reached over the necessary work to rectify this infrastructural repair.

But it quickly unravelled that the owner wanted the council to incur a significant cost, and the other council services who occupy the ground floor and the first floor (children’s social services and the youth service) had decided the premises did not figure in their long term plans. The decision has been made for all Council services to vacate the premises shortly.

In the short term the resources on offer for carers will be spread over two locations: the Ronald Gorton centre, which will have a dedicated space, with all the training and administrative staff moving to the Gatehouse Lodge. The overall aspiration in the long term is to create an independent living centre, and a bid for capital funding is currently being developed.

Health

Impending changes to health leadership

With the news that Mr Trevor Purt - chief executive of HMR NHS is to move on to pastures new, there is a critical phase ahead for the health sector locally.

The Council will monitor the appointment of his successor closely, as there are practical and strategic implications for our ongoing closer collaborative work.


Equitable Access First surgery soon to be open:

This programme that is delivering extra health care and GP resources across the borough is now firmly in its mobilisation phase.

The first new Equitable Access practice to come on stream will be in Smallbridge, and the planned opening will be on August 1st. The other four sites will be opened before the end of the year.



Supporting People
Inspection finds excellent prospects for service:

The recent Audit Commission inspection of the Supporting People service delivered a satisfactory verdict, as the programme was awarded a one star ‘fair’ rating.

The inspectors also judged that the service has ‘excellent prospects of improvement’, which is an extremely rare judgment as Rochdale only shares this distinction with one other local authority.

This is very promising news and I note with particular satisfaction that one of the strengths listed by the inspector was the leadership of the programme. I know elected members will want to continue the turnaround of the Supporting People programme and build on this most heartening judgement, to enable the service to continue on its improving trajectory