Councillors Mull Shake-Up Plans For Adult Social Care In Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire County Council looks set to shake-up its adult social care services. The council’s cabinet is considering for older people, shifting its focus toward domiciliary care, supported by telecare, and doing-up existing care homes. And for people with learning disabilities, the council is to enter into a joint commissioning plan with Northamptonshire Teaching Primary Care Trust.

Cabinet member for health and adult social services Rosemary Bromwich said: ‘It is overwhelmingly clear from our conversations with older people from across the county that more and more people want to live more independent lives and that traditional residential care is often people’s last option.

‘This new strategy outlines how we could look to fundamentally shift our direction from simply providing traditional residential and nursing care to supporting that offer with more tailor-made Extra Care housing solutions.’

‘Clearly there will also still be a need for more traditional models of nursing and residential care and where these are required we will look at how these can be improved. Some options considered in this new strategy include potentially offering incentives to the private sector such as increased payments to care homes and with premiums linked to improvements in services and maybe including financial rewards for those homes achieving good or excellent ratings from inspections.’

‘[For people with learning disabilities] We are focussing on developing the right range of services for everyone and want to focus on providing local services which can be used in the day, evening and weekend.

‘This plan is mapping out if we are to offer this full choice of services to people with learning disabilities through self-directed support, and to the carers, what new services will have to be available in the county. This is about shaping the market to deliver services to the individual customers rather than simply a huge block of service contracts to the council which may not suit individual needs.’