Approach helps Hertfordshire measure value of care
Nina Jacobs
Monday, May 27, 2019
Data allows targeted commissioning of services to meet specific needs.
- Needs and outcomes profile created for each child
- Scores for child's needs plotted on "radar chart" to track progress
ACTION
Hertfordshire County Council is using an innovative approach to enhance the commissioning of children's services to better meet the needs of its looked-after children.
The local authority is one of five areas across the UK to embed the Valuing Care programme, developed by independent consultancy Impower, in its social work teams.
The programme complements existing assessment tools to produce a needs and outcomes profile for both individual looked-after children as well as the entire population of young people under a local authority's care.
The decision to use Valuing Care came soon after Hertfordshire began rolling out its new care outcomes framework, says Marion Ingram, the council's operations director for specialist services.
She explains the "Outcome Bees" framework consists of six domains covering areas such as happiness, safety and independence.
"It's a way of translating an assessment into numerical values so that we have a way of noting change," explains Ingram.
Under each of the six outcomes, social workers and managers devised two explanatory sentences such as "needs support in managing their physical health" for the "be healthy" domain.
When a young person is taken into care, social workers use a tool to score the needs of the child against these 12 sentences which is then used to help find a placement for that child.
The scores are recorded on a "radar chart", which enables staff to track the progress of a young person over time.
"What we are very clear about is that it gives a much more rounded picture of who the child is and what their needs are because it goes across all those six outcome domains," says Ingram.
Social workers are asked to review the radar chart scores when they carry out periodical reviews of their looked-after children.
"Because we've built this system into our dashboard we can also look at our children's needs as a population and that informs the whole commissioning conversation.
"One of the highest needs for our looked-after children is around identity and self-esteem which you would think is really obvious but it's not something that we've really focused on.
"As a consequence of being able to analyse this data we've commissioned a lot of training around life story work for our foster carers, children's homes and social workers," explains Ingram.
Similarly, the data has led the authority to review mental health support for looked-after children after highlighting wellbeing as a major need.
Ingram says training is being delivered to social workers to ensure they prioritise the Valuing Care programme as well as advice and guidance in terms of how to score young people.
In its first year of operation, Ingram says the programme is helping staff to move away from traditional care planning methods that focus on risks to ones based on quantified need.
"That enables providers to work with us to reduce the needs of children they are looking after," she says.
As one of five local authorities to use Valuing Care - it is also being used in Oxfordshire, Central Bedfordshire, Norfolk and North East Lincolnshire - meetings have been held at senior level to share experiences of the programme.
"Ideally, the more of us that use it and the more consistency that we can get the more helpful it's going to be when you are talking about the broader commissioning conversation," adds Ingram.
IMPACT
The experience of a 15-year-old boy being looked after by Hertfordshire illustrates how the Valuing Care programme ensured his needs were identified and met after an adoption breakdown meant he was moved to residential care.
For each needs and outcomes profile carried out the boy's scores were plotted on a colour-coded radar chart. Over 18 months, the boy's scores - which were highest around identity, self-esteem and understanding his life story - had decreased and he was achieving good outcomes.
She says emerging data - small percentage changes in need scores over six months - show looked-after children's needs reducing.
"So for the first time ever I can actually say that the needs of our children are reducing while they are in care. We've never been able to say that before - we are making lives better for children."
Click here to read more in the Commissioning Children's Services Special Report