My Report to Council

Posted By: Pauline Maguire
Date Posted: 15/01/2010

Thank you Mr Mayor for the opportunity to report to the Council the latest developments on various matters relating to the Older People Portfolio.

Developments for older people are still progressing through two main strands:
• POPPs – Partnerships for Older Peoples projects
• Initiatives linked to the Council’s strategy for older people

POPPs
There have been some personnel changes to the POPP’s team. Jacinta Costello took up the POPP’s Manager’s post.

A new project has begun with the Alzheimers Society and POPP’s working to establish peer support networks in the Borough for people with dementia and their carers. The networks will be developed around a minimum of 6 well being cafes to serve neighbourhood localities throughout the Borough by March 2011. A dementia café coordinator will be appointed in the New Year who will be part of the POPP’s team and establish the peer support networks/dementia café’s in each of the townships.

Transport
Barry our Transport Coordinator continues to work on developing new transport initiatives to meet the need of older people in the Borough working closely with partners from the Public and voluntary sector. Funding to facilitate transport for clients of the Falls Team to new exercise classes has been secured. A meeting to appoint an enlarged management board for the VDS to takes place in December.
Barry is also working on facilitating a meeting by the middle of February with statutory and third sector organisations with the aim of securing a new Travel Training approach in Rochdale
He is also investigating options on how to further enhance the Hospital to Home service and assist the PCT with transport to out of hour’s clinics. In conjunction with Age Concern he is looking at producing a booklet aimed at increasing access to hospitals for residents of Rochdale Borough wide.

Consultation The TOPP’s panels have now evolved into Senior Citizen’s Forums (SCF) within established older people’s partnership structures and the Township democratic processes. Iram continues to support the development of these panels and the first meetings of the SCF in each township took place in October where the new structure, processes and terms of reference were agreed. Discussions took place around opening up membership to anyone over the age of 50. The meetings will take place on a quarterly basis before the Township meetings so that the SCF minutes are presented to the Township committees. The next rounds of SCF meetings are taking place in December.

Outreach Service
Membership has continued to increase during the first three quarters of the year. The largest proportion of new members continues to be self referrals, followed closely by referrals from Adult care. Since 1st April the percentage of older people visited, falling into the ‘socially isolated’ category has risen from 40% to 52%.
Transport continues to be the largest area of need along with social activities to alleviate isolation and loneliness. There is an increasing pressure on luncheon club places and we are seeing an increase in referrals where people need additional support to attend activities e.g. memory issues, personal care, medication prompting.
The respective member of the outreach team for each Township attends the SCF meeting to input identified unmet need within that Township.
Befriending and form filling continue to be the biggest need. CVS are developing a POPP’s befriending project from October 2009 to meet this huge need in the Borough.
As a result of extensive networking the outreach team have been able to link up other services to each other; for example the newly formed Rochdale ‘stroke service’, has been linked by the outreach team to a team from Bury Fairfield Hospital, who were discharging Rochdale Borough residents with no support services in place because they were outside the Bury boundaries. This has been addressed and an assessment process is now in place for all patients being discharged.

Carers.
Karan, our Carers Support Worker has identified and registered 171 older carers/carers of older people since April this year. This exceeds the 100 target set in our Implementation Plan for 2009-10 and is expected to rise, highlighting a large need in the Borough. She is delivering training over a six week period for workers at the Kashmiri Youth project to enable them to gain the knowledge and skills to identify and support carers of older people and older carers within the BME community. She has also represented POPP’s and taken part in a recent Carer’s Rights day at the Ronald Gorton Centre along with other POPP’s colleagues.
From March 2010 Karan will be spending 50% of her time working with carers attending the Dementia cafés that are being set up in the Borough as part of the delivery of the National Dementia Strategy in the Borough.

Boroughwide Older Person’s Strategy
The draft strategy and action plan are now out for consultation it has gone through the council committee structures and is going through the priority partnerships of the LSP. Consultation is being carried out throughout the borough until the 31St Jan 2010. The strategy will go to the LPSB on 1st March 2010 and Cabinet on 22nd March 2010. Any comments can be sent to kalsooom.iqbal@rochdale.gov.uk

Web Site Progress
Work is still in progress on the development of the older person’s website at the following link www.rochdale.gov.uk/olderpeople. The tender went out on the councils ‘chest’ procurement system- giving local businesses a chance to apply. Tangent One was chosen as they offered high quality work at a good price. They have been working with the council’s technical department to develop a basic structure of the site, agree corporate colours and look at the design. An initial draft of the design work has been done. The amendments have been sent to Tangent One. We will then agree the final design. Once this has been agreed it will take about a week to develop the navigation and structure of the pages and update the content material. IMPACT,are assisting in the technical work. In January 2010 we should be able to start usability testing with a group of older people and go live with the site shortly after.
We also have an active older people’s inbox that we are currently using to get comment s on the strategy and to deal with any issues relating to older people.

Older Persons Events
Recycled Teenagers are over for another year. We had some events that were very well attended whilst others were not as popular. We are hoping to change the structure of our events in some of our Townships next year and are looking into the possibility of having a couple of events with an increased focus on developing more low level preventative activities.

Dignity in Care Awards
The dignity in care awards took place 20 Oct 2009 at the Town Hall. Simon Weston attended the event which was a very successful evening and recognised the hard work and dedication of our nominees and winners. Simon has agreed to come back next year.

Reminiscence Project
This is currently being put on hold as we are investigating the Reminiscence service that the library service offer to avoid duplication of services in the borough in the light of the current efficiency savings.

BME Dementia Project
We have currently commissioned the drop in Dementia project with Dr Shakoor to develop a BME drop in dementia project further. The session are due to start this month and will help build the confidence of people suffering from dementia to improve the health and wellbeing of BME people by developing low level preventative services that can be provided locally for people. This project will run over the Xmas period. One of the requests from the BME community was to ensure that they have services available to them over the Xmas period when they do not celebrate Xmas and we are aiming to plug this gap with the project running over the festive season.

Volunteer Driver Scheme
We are currently working with Barry at POPPs to develop the volunteer driver scheme with a planned relocation in the bus station offices. We have committed some money towards this project and are hoping to widen the scope of the scheme to attract vulnerable groups to become volunteers.

Thank you Mr Mayor, I will be pleased to answer any questions from Members of the Council about these or any other matter relating to the Older People’s Portfolio.