Transforming North Northamptonshire Council’s Adult Social Care Provider Services - Consultation Questionnaire

The Council were seeking the views on their proposed strategy to transform the current services in order to deliver the highest quality assessment, re-ablement and enablement to support people to live their lives independently and be ambitious for their future.

The public consultation was carried out by the Council’s Consultation and Engagement Team and the Adult Social Care Provider Service. The consultation set out the proposals and enabled both online and non-digital means of participation, in accordance with nationally recognised good practice.

Eighteen face-to-face information and engagement sessions were held, reaching over 140 respondents total, each providing valuable feedback and questions. Responses from these sessions have directly fed into the consultation feedback and FAQs that are included within the consultation hub website.

• Care Provider Services Strategy and Case for Change document 
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) (up-dated February 2023)

In total, 253 respondents filled out a questionnaire, either partially or fully, and six written submissions. 18% of the respondents were users of Adult Social Care, 29% were members of the public, 41% were NNC staff & councillors and 12% had a third-party interest. The majority of respondents agreed with the principles proposed for the Transforming NNC Adult Social Care Provider Services.

Some respondents offered feedback to say that there was a need for user friendly language, and the consultation had too much jargon and was too wordy.

Respondents identified some missing principles and areas that could be strengthened including: 

• Ensuring adequate staff training and pay and reward was put in place, and making sure that there was a clear career path for staff working in our services.  
• Understanding possible financial implications of having long term support provided mostly by the independent care market.  
• Keeping support provision very localised. 
• Not just focusing on the short term but increasing longer term thinking, so people can live more independently.  
• Person-centred care and assessment with regular reviews.  
• Collaboration with the Integrated Care System (ICS), Healthwatch and other organisations.  

The responses were analysed and then presented to Cllr Helen Harrison, Executive Member for Adults, Health and Wellbeing and David Watts, Executive Director for Adults, Health Partnerships and Housing on 03 February 2023. Having considered the consultation feedback they have made the decision to implement the strategy using the delegated decision making process that was approved by the Councils Executive on 13 October 2022.

Some people said they found the strategy a little difficult to read and that some additional principles could be included or strengthened. We feel these are really good suggestions and will make some amendments to the strategy document to explain some of the terms we have used but this won’t change the overall strategy. We will also use the feedback to help shape phases 2 and 3 of the strategy, will use less jargon, and we will make sure that future correspondence will be simplified.

In implementing the strategy, we will change our focus from providing longer-term provision to one that delivers services which promote opportunities and independence for people. We will still consider if there are any services, that the care market struggles to provide, that it would be best for the council could deliver even if they provide longer-term care. These will be judged on a case by case basis and may apply to some of those services in phase 2 and phase 3 of the strategy.

We will work to develop a capital strategy with a view to invest in a younger adult’s purpose built unit that provides flexible assessment, transitions matching (for children moving to adult services and wanting to live more independently), and to support North Northamptonshire residents that are currently supported out of area to return to North Northamptonshire with the right support. Any proposed development will be based on current best practice examples.

Over the last few months, a number of residents at Beech Close, and their families, chose to look at other services as they could see that whatever decision was made that people would have to leave for up to three years whilst any work was carried out and the final resident has recently moved into their new home and service. As a result, and in line with our new strategy, we will now use the money that was used to run Beech Close to improve the services and provision that remain, whilst we support staff to find alternative roles. We will make sure that our staff receive a comprehensive training and development package of support to enable them to carry out new roles and are able to deliver services that will be providing re-ablement. We will also review our job descriptions to make sure that staff are adequately rewarded for the work they undertake.

The adoption of our new strategy helps us to progress the work to bring the Thackley Green Specialist Care Centre in Corby into North Northamptonshire Council’s provider services. We hope to base Therapy and Reablement staff from Reablement North at the Specialist Care Centre and look at how we can work in closer partnership with local health partners to support people to gain or regain their independence. By doing this we will be able to support people to move people through bed based and community reablement and back to their homes more quickly and confidently.

By implementing the strategy we expect to reduce spend in the independent care sector through not purchasing Discharge to Assess (D2A) beds at inflated market rates and by achieving better reablement outcomes which will lead to reduced length of stay, or later admissions to residential care, and deliver better outcomes for the people of North Northamptonshire.