Agenda item

The Director of Operations introduced an overview of the Adult Social Care Plan 2020. The main area of focus included service integration with health and social care to ensure continued locality work through communities, district nurses and general practitioners. Community lead support would follow by ensuring staff were well trained cross-departmentally and all stakeholders were knowledgeable of happenings around the community to enable meaningful participation of residents and a greater understanding on how different areas function. The council would use the service’s existing assets and estates and to make sure the basics of care had strong foundations.

The new social care record system (Liquid Logic) would be implemented, moving away from the current AIS system, it will be live from September 2020. The system will enhance the quality of data stored and enable greater ease of record sharing.

The insourcing of care and support in the 6 extra care units was completed on 4 January 2020. The service is currently rated as good by the Care Quality Commission, the ambition is to enable it to become ‘Outstanding’, whilst spending funds wisely adhering to a managed budget.

Panel Members explained that services should be bespoke for different communities because there were different needs across the borough. The needs of residents should also be aided by family community led support; the best approach to capture the people who suffered from isolation routed issues would be from those closer to the person in need.

The Director of Operations explained that they had established talking points with users and they would meet at locations of their choice, as opposed to Bernard Wetherill House, such as libraries of lunch clubs. These meetings would be centred on preventative and outreach work with the community and voluntary sector.

In response to a Panel Member raising the ongoing locality issues where services missed deprived or periphery areas and asking how they would find a solution, the Director of Operations assured that a meeting would be arranged between the leading officer for that operation and panel members to discuss how each area in the borough would be affected.

The Head of Innovation and Change told the Panel that children’s services had a family safeguarding project, which focussed their attention on not only services relating directly to children, but also a family approach to support immediate family members who could be suffering issues that could impede their caregiving such as substance abuse of domestic violence. An initiative would pilot combining parts of children’s and adult’s services for a more holistic approach. The Head of Safeguarding & Quality Assurance stated that studies had suggested many parents and carers who children’s services worked with had experienced complex issues, like those listed above; child protection work needed additional knowledge and expertise to improve situations.

Panel Members asked for an overview on the status of pre-teen and teen mental health, self-harm, problems arising from social media and issues relating to county lines. The Head of Safeguarding & Quality Assurance said that the Director Violence Reduction Unit should be invited to the next meeting to discuss violence reduction, Croydon having a heightened rate of domestic violence within London and how services needed to be mapped better to avoid duplication.  There was a cohort of young adults who may not reach the criteria to receive support, in a variety of health and social care services, where they would eventually reach that bar and it was clear that issues could have been addressed in that blind spot period. The Director of Operations stated that the service was looking towards a more preventative model to help those, which was often young people, who may be falling between the gaps in provision, engaging them in gateway services before they may experience a crisis or mental health problem.