Context:
Every year the UK government sends a pot of funding to each local authority (aka council) for them to spend on ensuring residents in their area who are eligible for state-funded social care get the support they require.
Each local authority then passes the necessary funding onto whichever independent care provider will be delivering an individual's care. Care providers are companies like our employers - homecare agencies.
So, local authorities effectively buy (aka 'commission') care packages from homecare agencies. This is what's known as the commissioning process.
This means that local authorities are effectively the customer when it comes to the process of arranging state-funded social care and, as a result, they are the ones who hold the ability to shape the nature and quality of end services (and our employment conditions).
Since the early 1990s, the commissioning process at local authorities has been informed by the principles of 'New Public Management', which is all about maximising financial efficiency. This has led to the embedding of a 'time-and-task' based approach to homecare, whereby an individual's care package is arranged around the minimum amount of time it should take a care worker to perform a series of prescribed tasks. This has been detrimental to both the overall quality of support available and to the wellbeing of care workers 👎
But there is hope! In Leeds, a project is starting which is trialling a different ‘outcomes-based’ approach to commissioning homecare. See the video at the top of this page for more information.
Members of Homecare Workers’ Group learned about the trial at a meeting with adult social care leaders from local authorities last week including the project’s director, Cath Roff MBE.
For the homecare workers involved in the project, the new approach will involve:
🕰️ Being given the autonomy to lengthen or shorten visit times as necessary each day
🔒 Shift-based pay (instead of only being paid for contact time with clients)
⬆️ A real Living Wage
I asked the question: what will it take for these changes to spread to all local authorities throughout the country?
Cath said that she has set up a thorough evaluation programme which will be collecting key information about the impact of this new approach being trialled in Leeds, including information about how much it is saving the NHS by keeping people out of hospital etc.
Basically then, the trial in Leeds needs to happen first. If it proves to be working from all points of view, the hope is that - in time - other local authorities will start to follow suit. It is great to know there are people at local authorities who are as passionate about improving working conditions and quality of care within homecare as we are.
I think the five of us who attended can all say that the meeting gave us some newfound hope 💜
Here are some resources about the project:
コメント