Issue - meetings

To consider a report of the Strategic Director of Children, Families and Adults (to follow)

Jacqui Evans, Head of Local Delivery/Independent Living Services, attended to provide the Committee with information on performance monitoring within Adult Social Care. She noted that the report was based on data at February 2012.

Jacqui continued to go through a number of performance indicators which had been retained following the removal of the National Indicator Set. Jacqui also drew attention to a new Departmental Management Team activity report that had been developed in which a number of key, additional analyses had been developed and incorporated. This included financial assessment timeliness activity and the impact of ‘returning’ self funders. It was noted that those performance indicators presented had, on the whole, improved from the previous year.

It was queried whether there were any areas of substantial underperformance that had not been reported on. Jacqui confirmed that all of the performance data for individual commissioning had been presented and that other data for the other areas could be provided at a future meeting.

Attention was drawn to the indicator relating to the Timeliness of social care packages (LI002). It was stated that whilst it was pleasing that an improvement had been made, the service needed to look at shortening the target completion time from 4 weeks in order to provide a more instructive and worthwhile measure. It was asserted that 4 weeks was too long a period to be acceptable for a care package to be put in place.

A number of concerns were expressed about the time and effort that was required to put together the data sets for the indicators. It was argued that the department should concentrate on building a framework on performance measures that were informative, readily available and easy to compare. Jacqui Evans agreed with this comment and stated that she would be happy to give more thought as to what measures would provide value and give a rounded picture. She acknowledged that there needed to be a balance between having worthwhile performance measures whilst not letting the construction of these get in the way of actually doing the work. 

RESOLVED –

a)    That the report be received

b)    That performance data from the other areas in Adult Social Care be brought to a future meeting.