This briefing paper examines the challenges facing social care in the UK and how ‘self-managed’ teams can address them, based on a number of case studies of innovation in social care from across the country.
Recommendations
- Ensure that people are aware of their social care rights, that frontline staff have the knowledge, skills and time to explain people’s options.
- Develop systems with reduced bureaucracy that do not prevent swift action that can lead to better care and more preventative support for those accessing social care.
- End the use of the ‘time and task’ commissioning in home care that prevents true relationship-centred care and services working in an outcomes focused way.
- Move towards a model of commissioning that better reflects the complexity of the system.
- Build and enable trusting relationships between commissioners, providers and staff to enable self-managing services to develop and thrive.
- When commissioning new services, enable them to develop, and avoid overly prescriptive “pilots” that are designed to achieve unrealistic outcomes.
- The Care Quality Commission must drastically review its model to ensure that it doesn’t crush innovation.
Download Radical Home Care (pdf, 0.4MB)
Read Ruth's blog on 4 social care challenges we can tackle with self-management
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