Column by Councillor Beccy Hopfensperger, Suffolk County Council Cabinet Member for Adult Care
Suffolk County Council has had quite a bit of good news recently when it comes to Adult Social Care, as I covered recently in a previous column, we had a great result at the Social Worker of the Year Awards, with wins in several categories. We also celebrated the 2nd birthday of Cassius, the council’s digital care provider which is helping people stay independent for longer in their own homes using the latest care technology. Most recently, however, the Care Quality Commission has rated the quality of Adult Care Services provided by Suffolk County Council as Good - a huge achievement for Suffolk and something we are all rightly proud of.
Earlier this year the Care Quality Commission, the government watchdog that monitors and oversees the quality of adult social care services, announced that it was looking for local authorities to volunteer to be part of the initial pilot inspections to test its brand-new local authority inspection process. This represented quite a bit of risk for any local authority volunteering, as it meant they would be inviting the CQC to lay bare publicly any issues it found with how adult care services are being provided. It would also involve a huge amount of work on already busy officers and teams; however, our fantastic leadership team were totally supportive, because in Suffolk we have a well-established culture of learning and constant improvement, and we accepted that these inspections will help support better quality services for people across the country, so it was right that Suffolk put itself forward to be a test subject in this pilot assessment.
There is a huge amount to do when you are being assessed by CQC, to begin with teams across Adult Social Care began to create our self-assessment document which would be based on the themes laid out by CQC in their inspection framework. These themes included how well we work with people, how we ensure a safe social care system, the quality of what we do and the effectiveness of our leadership. Alongside our self-assessment we ended up providing over 325 individual pieces of evidence to the CQC. On top of that, SCC then arranged 40 interviews for 164 staff, partners, and people with lived experience of Adult Social Care to meet with CQC and discuss themes in more detail, a huge undertaking!
In the summary of their report CQC said; "Overall feedback from people was positive in relation to the approach of front-line staff, and the care and support provided. Staff focused on providing the best care and support for people.
Staff were overwhelmingly positive about working for the local authority including the leadership and culture. Support with staff well-being, learning and development, and career progression was good." This was brilliant to read, not just because it’s great news, but because it is the view coming from staff, partners, and especially important, people with lived experience of adult social care.
There are areas where more work is needed of course, CQC said we were good - not perfect. The good news is that we have already begun working on those areas, like the care assessment process, where we want to make that process quicker, make it more intuitive from the outset and better capture the ideas and views of individuals from the moment they begin the process of assessing care needs. We are also looking at new strategies including around an All-Age Autism Strategy, and we are continuing to develop upon our All-Age Carers Strategy that we launched last year.
The best thing about a good rating is that it should give us all confidence that we have the right people and right priorities to make necessary improvements so we can provide an even better quality of care in the future. It also provides clear proof that the County Council is delivering on its aims to put people’s health and wellbeing as one of its key priorities.
I want to congratulate everyone who works in Adult Social Care at Suffolk County Council on this fantastic result. Of course, I always knew you were good – but it is great to have independent confirmation of that fact.
