I work with visionary leaders like you who are serious about changing services to improve outcomes for people.
All in Adult Social Care
Should care workers provide low level mental health support? Be skilled in recognising the warning signs of suicide? Administering insulin to diabetic people in the community? Develop specialist knowledge and skills in caring for people with Alzheimer’s? The list goes on and the potential is enormous……….
I’m working on a Rayne Foundation funded project with NWADASS and SCIE to better understand the enablers that support social care workers to have a good experience at work and how in turn that supports attraction, recruitment and retention into adult social care. The lens we are focusing on is blended roles in Tameside, Greater Manchester. What stands out about Tameside’s success is their relationships first approach………..
If you’re a social worker or occupational therapist working part time, I’d love to hear your experiences. What are the practical things that make it work? What makes it hard? How do we do more of it? I’m working with the LGA and ADASS to learn more so we can work alongside councils to enable more flexible working to be available more often. Click the pic for more…….
Change is an ever-constant in public services and there are loads of examples of brilliant changes that people have made happen. So why aren’t these examples spreading and scaling? What stops us learning from what others have done? What do you want to know and how do you want to know about it so that you can draw on the experiences of other change agents to make change happen where you work? Clic the pic to read more ……..
In 2021, the Community Care job seekers survey found that flexible working is the most important benefit that social workers look for in a job and yet only 19% of social work jobs advertised in Community Care were offered with part time or flexible hours. Look closer and you’ll hear stories from social workers telling you that full time is always preferred by employers and that securing a social work job with a non-traditional working pattern is hard to come by. So how do we make flexible working work for social work - safely and in a way that balances the needs of service users with the needs of social workers. I’m looking for your help….Clic the pic to read more
With the sad and concerning news today that the social care workforce has reduced by 50,000 over the last year I’m revisiting my mini blog series focusing on what’s causing social care workforce challenges and how we address them. With the cost of living crisis, energy prices rocketing and mortgage rates rising we can’t afford to not talk about pay. Tackling social care workforce pressures is multi-faceted. There are lots of things we can do differently to help improve the current situation but if we don’t get pay right we won’t have the impact we are looking for. Decent pay is a fundamental foundation of a sustainable adult social care workforce. Click the pic to read more……
In this final blog of the series, I step back and reflect on the big themes that have emerged from diving into some of the reasons why adults social care is experiencing workforce pressures. Through the journey I’ve been on with Andrew Burridge, NWADASS, we’ve explored some of the immediate actions that are with any of our gift to take to improve recruitment practices as well as diving deeper to explore some of the system issues impacting on workforce recruitment and retention and what some of the longer term solutions could be. Click the pic to read more…..
This week I’m thrilled that Linda Hutchinson of LHAlliances has agreed to guest blog for the penultimate of this mini series. Linda is the leading expert on alliance contracts in public sector in the UK. Linda is a highly experienced senior professional with twenty five years’ experience in frontline health services. She has a strong track record of innovation and delivery of major change programmes in university, health, government and regulatory sectors. Here Linda writes about the role that Alliance contracting could play in helping to alleviate workforce pressures in Adults Social Care in the longer term.
