The Care Act – what can children’s services teach adult care?

I have blogged quite regularly on children’s social care over the last few months – particularly around how technology can help free social workers to spend more time with children and families.

As the Care Act begins to transform adult social care, I thought it would be interesting to highlight some of the technology that is already helping children’s services staff to work more efficiently and effectively and explore how these tools might support authorities in meeting their new obligations for adult care in the years ahead.

So, what challenges will adult social services teams face in implementing the changes? And how can the technology being used to plan and deliver support for vulnerable children and families help? 

Managing workloads

There are some key changes taking place as part of the Care Act that have the potential to put huge pressure on the workloads of staff responsible for managing care requirements for adults. Authorities will need to provide advice and guidance on care and support services to anyone who needs it, regardless of whether or not they will be picking up the bill.

Coupled with this, the new obligation to assess the needs of carers, as well as the person who is to be cared for, could result in a 50 per cent increase in workloads alone.

In children’s services, one of the ways that local authorities are already easing the burden of administration on staff is to offer online portals that parents use to check eligibility for education grants or free school meals and apply for school places. An increasing number of families are also using a website to ascertain whether they are entitled to the childcare funding that is on offer for two-year-olds and if they are, they can find out where the nursery places are available in their area in just a few clicks.

Doing things online means that the information authorities need from parents is captured instantly and there is no rekeying required or time spent searching for missing data at the authority end. This saves time and money, but more importantly, speeds up the whole process for parents so that children can start to benefit from the childcare on offer.

A self-service option will be an efficient way for authorities to ensure that vulnerable adults and their carers can find out what help they are entitled to. They can then be directed to the information and support they need, quickly and easily.

Putting the right help in place sooner

As has been the case in children’s services for a number of years, early intervention is expected to become a mantra in adult social care too. The aim of providing the right help sooner is to help those who are able to be more independent, with a focus on improving their wellbeing. 

With children and young people, the multi-agency approach sits at the heart of the early help agenda. Local authorities will now be expected to ensure that teams such as health and social care are working much more closely together to meet the needs of vulnerable adults – alongside other agencies such as the police around safeguarding issues. Some timely nutritional advice, meal planning support or help with transport to and from hospital appointments might be all a recently widowed man needs to keep him from ending up in the care system, for example. So getting the appropriate practitioners involved early could make a real difference.

Whatever systems authorities use need to support the different teams involved in accessing the most up-to-date information on those in their care, in a timely way.

After all, whether the aim is to support independence in the home, provide residential care or deal with a safeguarding concern, it is just as important for the right support to be put in place quickly with a vulnerable adult as it is when we are talking about a child.

Phil Neal is managing director at Capita One