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Stories from social care leadership: progress amid pestilence and penury
Stories from social care leadership: progress amid pestilence and penury
- Collection:
- Health Policy and Services Research
- Author(s):
- Humphries, Richard, author
Timmins, Nicholas, author - Contributor(s):
- King's Fund (London, England), issuing body.
- Publication:
- [London, England] : The King's Fund, February 2021
- Language(s):
- English
- Format:
- Text
- Subject(s):
- Administrative Personnel
Health Services for the Aged -- standards
Nursing Homes -- standards
Social Support
National Health Programs
Quality of Health Care
United Kingdom - Genre(s):
- Technical Report
- Abstract:
- Adult social care is the too often forgotten, too often invisible, arm of the British welfare state. It has, for a decade now, been under acute financial pressure. As part of The King’s Fund’s work on leadership in health and social care, Richard Humphries and Nicholas Timmins interviewed some 40 people about the nature of leadership in the sector. Where does it lie? How effective it is? What might be done to improve it? From those interviews, we have drawn some conclusions, and raised some issues for discussion. (1) Local authority support for user groups, and for local care home associations and their equivalents for domiciliary care, appears to pay dividends. The best local authorities appear to value that feedback, the worst hide from it. (2) Leadership matters at every level in social care, and there is a powerful case for investing more in training and development--at every level. (3) Longstanding promises to improve the quality of data need to be honoured. (4) There is a case for finding a mechanism to take the heat out of the annual battle between commissioners and providers over fees. (5) The sector might well benefit from a more unified voice than that provided by the current myriad of representative bodies, and the work of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services in particular could be strengthened. (6) There is also a case for an annual assessment, probably by the Care Quality Commission, of the quality of both local authority and NHS commissioning in this sector--assessments that should strengthen the hand of those seeking to improve services locally. (7) Leadership from the top is judged to have been missing for some time, and while the Department is taking steps to address that, those steps need to be pursued with vigour. The most depressing quote we heard in the course of this work was not from one of our interviewees but from Lord Bethell, the social care minister in the House of Lords. He told peers that ‘There simply is not the management or political capacity to take on a major generational reform of the entire industry in the midst of this massive epidemic.’ That may well be true in the short term. But a minimum requirement is that the Department is put into a position where it has the management and policy-making capacity to undertake that once the pandemic is contained.
- Copyright:
- Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY license. (More information)
- Extent:
- 1 online resource (1 PDF file (53 pages))
- NLM Unique ID:
- 9918299587306676 (See catalog record)
- ISBN:
- 9781909029989
- Permanent Link:
- http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9918299587306676