Webwatch: SCIE Organisational change in Social Care
Achieving successful organisational change is a core responsibility for all adult social care managers. A new digital resource, launched this week, is designed to support managers working in social care to deal with change within their organisations. They will become more confident in selecting approaches and tools that will assist them in ‘change management’.
Until now, there haven’t been many resources to support managers. So, the new resource and film, from the Social Care Institute for Excellence and in partnership with the Universities of Birmingham and Middlesex, addresses this.
It offers support for managers in care services, local authorities and integrated health and social care services. Managing change is challenging but the resource can build your knowledge, skills and confidence.
SCIE and the Universities spoke widely to managers and people who use services and they created four case study scenarios of managers in different social care contexts together with a compilation of change approaches. There is an accompanying film, embedded in the site.
The resource features change management tools to help support change. The new interactive digital format means that people will be able to quickly use and apply to tool to real-life issues.
SCIE’s Chief Executive, Tony Hunter, says: “This resource will be a helpful starting point for social care managers in either local authority or independent provider settings. We really want them to use it in practice and we also want to hear from anyone who’s used the resource, to tell us how it’s supported them.”
Robin Miller (pictured) from the health services management centre at the University of Birmingham, says: “Managing change is a day-to-day reality for most social care managers, and over the course of their careers they will have built up a set of practice-based skills and experiences about what has worked in the past that they can apply to future change situations. However, they’ve often found it hard to access the potential learning from change management experiences from other sectors and the more formal research base. This new resource addresses this gap through demonstrating how change tools and approaches can be deployed in adult social care by following the stories of four managers facing very real challenges and opportunities.”
In the accompanying film, Tony Waterfield, senior practitioner at Solihull council, says: “People can really benefit from online learning like this. They can remind themselves on how change can feel and they can find out how managers can be supported to adjust to change, and to recognise the vast wealth of skills they and their workforce possess. I’ve very impressed by this new resource.”
Ian James, Director for Communities and Adult Social Care, says: “Change is necessary as never before in Adult Social Care as we respond to the shifting service and financial landscape. Often we make the job more difficult for ourselves by failing to recognise the human instinct to resist change and by focussing on the process of change rather than the experience. This new digital resource will support managers to deal with the experience of change for them and their staff, and to adopt approaches that support it as a positive experience.”
Four scenarios
The resource looks at real-life examples and these four case study examples can help:
- Alex: manager of a care home for older people owned by a housing association
- Bharat: manager of a new generic adult team within a local authority
- Carl: manager of a new recovery hub within an NHS mental health trust
- Denise: manager of residential care for people with learning disabilities which is closing down.
You are able to follow the four social care professionals as they manage their own organisational change. All of them will use the Planned Cycle of Social Care Change (PCSCC) as the framework for their change. Each of the managers will use a range of change approaches and management tools to help them plan and implement their organisational change.
In the resource you can also find a range of approaches and tools on managing organisational change in the A-Z directory. The original research on which the resource is based was funded by the NIHR School for Social Care Research.
Visit the resource here: Managing organisational change in adult social care
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