Agenda item

Medway’s three priorities are set out in the new Council Plan 2016/17. This report summarises how the Council has performed in Quarter 3 2016/17 against the priority most relevant to this Committee.

Discussion

The Director of Children and Adults Services introduced the report. This included information in relation to the progress of the Adult Social Care Strategy and the Three Conversations Model. The Three Conversations Model had been trialled in the ME4 and ME5 postcodes. It was being evaluated with a view to rolling it out across Medway. The Making Safeguarding Personal programme was now fully embedded into the work of Adult Social Care, with work having taken place over the last year to improve the safeguarding recording process.

In relation to adult safeguarding, the year end figures showed that 87% of individuals who were asked about their personal outcomes said that these outcomes had either been fully or partially achieved.

The target of 30% of clients receiving direct payments for their social care had not been met, with the end of year figure being 27.6%. Staff in the Financial Assessment teams had moved from the Council’s Customer Care service to Adult Social Care. It was anticipated that these staff would be able to support more clients to consider receiving direct payments.

There had been a reduction in the number of permanent admissions to care homes for both the 18 to 64 and 65 plus age groups. This was positive as the aim was to enable people to stay in their own homes wherever possible.

Figures for Delayed Transfers of Care (DToC) had shown improvement with the end of year figure likely to be 3.3 per 100,000 of population, compared to a target of 4. Medway’s figures for DToC were within the top quartile of local authorities in the South East and were average compared to Medway’s statistical neighbours. On the Friday prior to the Committee meeting there had been 22 Delayed Transfers of Care with none of these being attributable to Adult Social Care, the first time this had been achieved.

A carer satisfaction survey was undertaken every two years. This showed that satisfaction levels had fallen 6% compared to two years previously and were  10% below target. Some of the data was provisional so there could be some improvement but this was not expected to be significant. It was possible that the fall in carer satisfaction could be due to carers feeling under more pressure and stress. The Committee was also informed that work was taking place with the Carer Partnership Board to refresh the Carer’s Strategy.

A Committee Member agreed that the decrease in carer satisfaction could be attributable to carers feeling under pressure and questioned what could be done to address this and whether the opportunity of undertaking individual assessments of carers in relation to their needs was being fully exploited. Another Committee Member said that she was aware that some carers were disappointed that they had not received feedback after having been asked for their opinion.

The Director of Children and Adults Services advised that there was an improvement in the number of people accepting carer assessments and that the needs identified by these assessment tended to be either met or mostly met. Regular updates were provided to the Carer Partnership Board.

Decision

The Committee considered 2016/17 performance against the key measures of success used to monitor progress against the Council Plan 2016/17.