Chapter 8: Capacity for improvement
We found that capacity for improvement was good, with important strengths and some areas for improvement. The capacity for improvement was not uniform across the department, and there remained significant challenges in developing partnerships with health services. We found early but clear signs of progress in this area.
We set out our reasons for this overall judgement in the paragraphs below.
Outcomes and partnerships
An important aspect of the capacity for future improvement lies in the past improvement performance of the department. As is evident from Chapter 3 of this report, there had already been significant improvements in outcomes in youth justice and in the educational attainment of looked after and accommodated young people. Service users and carers responding to our survey were generally positive about the services they received, and there was an already-established and evident culture of reflection and inquiry into performance across all of the department's services.
There remained areas where progress had been slower. For instance, there was still a long way to go on delivering fully on person-centred planning and improved employment for people with learning disabilities, and single shared assessments were only in place in older people's services. In children's services, there was some unallocated work, especially in the children with disabilities team. Transfers of cases from child protection to locality teams were also subject to delay.
Our evidence suggests that, in general, children's services were developing positively in Dundee, and we were confident that the department had the capacity to improve on the issues that that we identify in this report. We will follow progress on this carefully.
The department has to perform better in its partnerships with carers. Too many felt that the department had failed to consult them or take account of their views. We consider that harnessing the expertise of users and carers is a significant component of capacity for improvement and we will follow progress on the implementation of a new user involvement policy and the carers' strategy.
The MAISOP recommendations for Dundee focused on the requirement for better partnership with health services to improve outcomes for older people using services. At the time of the multi-agency inspection, it found that the capacity for improvement in older people's services was 'adequate'. Earlier in this report, we presented evidence and analysis that there were early signs of an improving partnership between the social work department and the community health partnership ( CHP) in Dundee.
However, senior managers told us that the local authority had made a strategic decision to focus resources on developing children's services. The way that it divides its resources between children's services and services for adults reflects that decision. The department spends more than the Scottish Government grant aided expenditure ( GAE) indicated level in children's services, and less than the GAE level for older people. We found that this trend was continuing, and we are concerned that this will restrict the capacity of the local authority to improve. We made a recommendation in Chapter 6 about making sure that there is sufficient resource to develop older people's services.
Early signs of improvement included the recent joint commissioning of additional home care hours with the CHP to help reduce waiting lists, and the partners were in the process of creating a joint commissioning strategy for older people's services and had reformed the older people's strategic planning group. The MAISOP report commented on the potential of the CHP to address some of the evident difficulties 40 in the partnership, and we will follow carefully the development of that relationship to see if that comes to fruition. Substantial challenges lie ahead, and the partners should remain vigilant to ensure progress in the right direction.
The social work department had already shown that it had the capacity to build good partnerships, for instance with education and police in the area of youth justice, with those agencies plus health services in child protection, and in community care with health in the first response team and the integrated ways that they provided home care. The experience and learning it had gained from these partnerships ought to boost its capacity to progress successfully its partnership with health services.
Quality assurance and performance management
The department showed strong evidence of its capacity for improvement because it had a clear commitment to quality management and assurance, including the use of EFQM methods at departmental and team level. It also had a culture of using surveys, reviews and studies to evaluate its performance, for instance, its recent evaluation of its family support service or the roll out of 'getting our priorities right'. We found this praiseworthy, but we felt that the department could set out more consistently how it would use the results of these studies to drive improvements.
There were clear areas where there was a need for improvement in the basic processes of assessment and care management. File reading results showed that, in some key aspects, performance evident in community care files was significantly poorer than in children's files. Older people living in care homes were not getting regular reviews. We did note that community care was starting to use a file audit template derived from the one that SWIA uses to audit files. This was a positive step, but senior managers will need to monitor results to ensure that the necessary practice improvements take place.
Staffing and leadership
We found evidence of very good staff motivation and ownership of the department's vision and strategy. We also found that the department had managed and supported its staff very well. There was evidence that progress in this area was continuing, for instance the department was seeking to retain its 'investors in people' status and aspired to improve their present 'silver' award in 'Scotland's Health at Work' (healthy working lives) to 'gold'. We thought that leadership overall was good, with a clearly articulated political and senior managerial vision and direction, albeit set against a backcloth of financial constraint especially evident within community care services due to a longstanding corporate decision to prioritise children's services.
It is probable that employees as motivated as those working for the social work department are a very significant part of capacity for improvement. The department was doing the right things to develop and equip its staff, but it had somewhat neglected succession planning. Senior managers indicated to us that doing this was a current priority. The department did not have a strategy for this at the time of the inspection. We comment further on this issue in Chapter 6.