North Lincolnshire Council Shares their CQC Inspection Journey & Sunderland City Council Outlines the Business Case & Benefits of Automating ASC Service User Engagement
30/11/2023
Yesterday saw the last in our series of Contact&Connect webinars, with a special focus on the incoming CQC inspections. The session featured colleagues from both North Lincolnshire Council and Sunderland City Council, speaking about being a CQC pilot authority and their use of automated telephony to mainstream engagement, respectively. With CQC inspections due to roll out more widely in 2024, the session was well-timed and saw our biggest audience yet, with registrations from over 100 people from 63 local authorities.
Starting off the session, Charna Manterfield, Head of Adult Strategy and Assurance at North Lincolnshire Council (NLC) outlined the experience of being one of the five CQC’s pilot authorities. With the pilot reports only just published on Nov 17th, this was one of the first times the wider local government community had been able to come together and hear from an authority who had been through the process. Charna’s reflections not only gave understanding to the process in terms of timeframes, the ‘ask’ on their small team and the wider activities, but outlined the support they received from partners who really stepped up to support the inspection process.
The inspection process has left a really positive legacy with the team, “We pulled together as a strong team and improved our self awareness as to how we articulate our story and the good work we do to support our communities and residents.” More widely, the already good relationships are now stronger with partners across health, the voluntary sector, the Humber region and other experts.
Alongside reflections around the process, Charna outlined how the actual CQC inspection approach was evolving as they worked through the five pilot authorities (NLC was the 4th).
The area that generated the most questions and compliments from the online audience was NLC’s ‘Experts Together’ partnership, which includes NLC, housing providers, education providers, NHS, Fire, Police, ASC commissioned providers et al. The partnership works with people as “they want to be worked with”, underpinned by a dedicated pledge committing all partners to ‘ask, listen & act’.
The strength of the partnership was really brought to life, as Charna explained their recent annual celebration event. At the event, partners shared specific examples of work directly linked to the pledge, and how they involved people with lived experience to shape that work. They also got the CQC to sign up to the pledge whilst on site!
Picking up on the focus the CQC has given to service user engagement, NLC identified that this was an area they were keen to automate and mainstream, and we ran a number of polls with the audience to ascertain how councils are currently engaging with service users, and how successful that is.
Both discovery councils (Manchester City Council & Hampshire County Council) identified service user engagement as a challenge, and results from the pilot authorities were mixed in terms of engagement processes and success. Certainly it’s clear that the CQC will be looking for improved engagement not only with service users, but their families, advocates and carers, with a specific focus on seldom heard communities. The majority of the councils represented were using a range of methods to communicate with service users and gather their experiences and feedback, with most achieving somewhere between 10%-20% in terms of response rates.
These service user engagement rates set the scene for Julie Lynn, Head of Business Development, Adult Social Care at Sunderland City Council to outline how they are already using Contact&Connect to support a range of ASC services – from driving the return of Community Loan Equipment, supporting people as they come off the Reablement pathway and also regularly engaging with both complex and children’s wheelchair users. Having been an initial partner in our automated telephony collaboration – with services live for over two years – to date Sunderland has engaged with over 10,000 of their ASC service users using the automated approach.
With the CQC putting such an emphasis on service user engagement, Sunderland recently launched a new Contact&Connect service specifically to support the inspections and the annual review process.
Julie outlined her motivations for driving an automated approach and gathering feedback at a larger scale. Benefits in terms of care planning and provision, practice improvement, contract management, workforce development and more effective management of resources, plus a way to promote Sunderland’s information and guidance offer.
A new area of discussion was how Sunderland plans to use the feedback from the automated calls to inform and support a proportionate assessment approach, as recently recommended by the Chief Social Worker.
Julie said, “We’ve all had backlogs, or got backlogs of annual reviews, so it’s how could we use the Contact&Connect approach to support a range of areas.”
The idea is focused on understanding what percentage of care packages remain unchanged year on year, and where people respond positively to all the questions asked, their reviews could potentially be undertaken by an unqualified worker, allowing qualified social workers to focus on those people whose care and support needs have changed. Julie outlined the business process change they have worked up and implemented, as well as the business case in terms of hours required based on their caseloads; the headline of which is a £86,192 annual saving.
The 1.5 hour session covered the proportionate review savings, plus additional savings around reducing in-person calls and letter/survey management. Whilst hopefully the above gives you a good flavour or what was covered, we recorded the session and are happy to share it on request.
