Issue - meetings

To consider a report of the Strategic Director of Children, Families and Adults.

Building on a report that the Committee received on 22 November 2011, the Committee considered an update report on the progress of the production of the Local Account for Adults who were in receipt of Social Care intervention. Dave Caldwell, Senior Information Officer explained that producing a Local Account was part of government proposals following the abolition of the Annual Performance Assessment by the CQC and the National Indicator Set. This was intended to be a document published by the Council on how it believed it had made progress on achieving its goals for adult social care over the past year.

Dave continued to explain that the Council had set up a ‘Local Account Steering Group’ to oversee the development of the Local Account. The Steering Group had agreed that since the Local Account was intended to be a document local people could use to hold the Council to account, it should reflect their priorities and be in a format that is meaningful to them. As a result work was carried out to gather service users’ and other partner organisation’s views through surveys, questionnaires and focus group/face-to-face interview work.

Following from this, a number of principles were established:

·         In order to be a credible document, the Local Account should be honest and transparent: it should address areas of weakness in performance and priorities going forward.

·         The document format and content should be “interesting, simple, informative and bright”

·         It needed to be concise and written from the customer perspective - avoiding internal and professional jargon; and reflect customer priorities.

·         The Local Account should be an ongoing process not just an annual document.  The Local Account document was merely a part of the process of transparency and accountability to local citizens.

Similarly in terms of the structure of the document, the following themes were established as a framework:

• person centred care;
• having independence, choice and opportunities;
• quality of care; and
• feeling safe and protected.

In terms of completion, Dave Caldwell reported that it was hoped that the final version of the Local Account would be available in July 2012.

It was queried whether the document had to be called a ‘Local Account’ as this could be deemed confusing in terms of a presumed relationship with ‘financial accounts’. Dave Caldwell acknowledged that this was an issue and confirmed that service users would be involved in the naming of the document.

It was questioned whether the document would be compared with other authorities. Dave Caldwell reported that whilst there would be no external inspection from government there would be the opportunity for informal peer review.

A discussion was had over the reach and purpose of the document. It was stated that whilst it was understood that the document needed to be adapted to suit its target audience, this would be misguided if that audience had no demonstrable interest in reading the document. It was also asserted that the simple format of the document could possibly leave those with a  ...  view the full minutes text for item 55