Survey Launched To Help Local Authorities Build A Personalised Model Of Social Care
By News England

As part of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) and Skills for Care’s joint work to provide a practical methodology to help Directors develop workforce commissioning strategies, to enable the step change to a personalised model of social care, a survey has been launched, and circulated to all Directors of Adult Social Services in England.

The survey will help Directors of Adult Social Services charged with working with their colleagues in children’s services, public health and the NHS to produce joint strategic needs assessments, especially addressing any workforce shortages and skills gaps – in a new wave of integrated frameworks for such local co-operation, InLAWS (Integrated Local Area Workforce Strategies). InLAWS are more complex than traditional organisational workforce plans because they focus on the whole social care labour market in a locality and include all providers.

The survey has been approved by the ADASS Workforce Development Network and the ADASS Research Group. The research company Ipsos MORI will be conducting the survey. The results of the survey will help ADASS and Skills for Care develop a practical methodology to help Directors fulfil their professional leadership and workforce planning responsibilities. This builds on the ADASS publication Commissioning and the workforce and the accompanying ADASS/CSIP document What does a commissioning framework look like? (2007)

Whatever stage an authority is at, Directors are being encouraged to take part in the survey, so as to voice their opinion and contribute to the shape of strategic workforce solutions. With the Audit Commission (June 2008) warning that only one in four local Councils in England and Wales had adequate or effective workforce plans, the results of the survey will be an important next step in the evolution of strategic workforce planning.

“This survey will give Directors of Adult Social Services the chance to voice their opinion on how to develop this critical methodology that will support them in developing workforce commissioning strategies linked to their Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNA) that will enable us to deliver Putting People First,” says Jo Cleary, Co-Chair of the ADASS Workforce Network.

“We will be letting all Directors of Adult Social Services know the results of this survey and what we plan to do next. We want to make sure the outcomes from this are as practical and user friendly as we can. Our partners Skills for Care will work with a group of local authorities to find out what works well, test out materials and share them. This survey is the first step.”

“Workforce planning is really crucial to the delivery of quality services, so Skills for Care hopes every Director will respond to this survey. It is important for us to make sure we create a model that will make a real difference to the ways integrated workforce planning is undertaken that will benefit millions of people who use services and carers,” says Skills for Care CEO Andrea Rowe.

“Our partnership with ADASS uniquely places us to deliver to all Directors a tool which will help them to develop practical workforce commissioning strategies to improve the delivery of care services in their communities and to drive forward the transformation agenda.”