Agenda item

This report summarises the performance of the Council’s Key Measures of Success for 2012/13 as set out in the Council Plan and the Council’s annual report insofar as they relate to this Committee. 

Discussion:

The Deputy Director, Children and Adults, introduced the year end performance monitoring report and highlighted the areas of successful achievements along with areas for improvement.

He explained that the national survey for people receiving social care and a national survey for carers were very unhelpfully worded and unnecessarily cumbersome which had been offputting for recipients and had not enabled the Council to glean useful feedback.  He referred to the success of a piece of work commissioned by the Council through the voluntary sector a few years ago whereby volunteers had been recruited to visit carers and service users in their homes.  This helped people to give honest feedback without any fear of reprisals and enabled changes to be made to services to improve service users’ experience.  He hoped to be able to repeat this next year in order to ensure service users are able to feed back openly and constructively.

In relation to carers’ assessments he stated that the plan to use trusted assessors had not been as successful as had been hoped.  Many assessments had taken place but only a small number could be counted as carers of people open to receiving a service fro the Council, as per the performance indicator definition.

The Director of Public Health stated that the year end figure for smoking cessation was above the target although not as high as the previous year.  This was consistent with performance of services in other parts of the country.

Discussion took place around the needs of carers and the positive outcomes for carers from the combined budget from the Council and the NHS Medway Clinical Commissioning Group.  The Deputy Director, Children and Adults gave an illustration of how this budget had enabled GPs to refer carers for respite for instance.  It was requested that further information should be provided in a report to a future meeting.  Members wished for the report to also update on quality of care provided in social care to ensure consistency of service and value for money.  The Deputy Director, Children and Adults emphasised that in the event any Member of the Council, or member of the public, had concerns about the quality of care provided in Medway that they should report them to Adult Social Care and that they would be investigated.

A suggestion was made that as part of the work of the public health team it would be helpful if they could feed back to social care colleagues any details of people they deal with who may be carers or in need of care.  The Director of Public Health felt this was a helpful suggestion and undertook to look into this.  The Director of Public Health reminded the Committee that she had produced a needs assessment for carers which could be circulated to the Committee.

The Chief Clinical Officer, NHS Medway Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) emphasised that the CCG wanted to be involved in caring with people rather than caring for them as it was important to get relationships right.  He stated that many people visiting their GP did not even consider the fact that they were in fact classified as carers and may be in need of support.

Decision:

(a)               The 2012/2013 year end performance monitoring report was noted;

(b)               A report be added to the work programme on support for carers as set out above.