Councillors to approve Social Services Annual Report: Achievements, challenges, and future plans
Councillors are set to approve the latest Social Services Annual Director’s Report, which highlights achievements such as reducing agency staff further and the ongoing work to hit six quality standards.
Challenges include the ongoing budgetary constraints and the need for more foster carers. The report also noted progress in children’s social care, with a focus on in-house provision and again reducing agency staff. Lead Members also noted that the new wellbeing hub in the city centre is well-used, and efforts are being made to improve workforce development.
Adult Social Care, Health and Well-being Lead Member Cllr John Pritchard explained that the report had been provided to stakeholders with ‘no comments raised or reporters, “The report is a public document that will be published on our website that sets out what we planned to do over the last 12 months, how we performed across six standards during that time, and what we plan to do over the next 12 month period across social care services.”
“Whilst we have made huge strides in establishing a new improved structure for the department, which has allowed us to make recognised improvements, particularly across our children and young people services. We still have further work to do embedding a substantial and resilient structure and workforce, which has always been challenging. ”
“There’s some challenges throughout, there’s been a significant reduction in agency staff in social care, an increase in permanent staff, and reduction of some wait lists, alongside continuing significant budgetary challenges as we moved into this financial year”.
Children’s and Family Services Lead Member Cllr Rob Walsh added , “‘One priority is ‘care closer to home’. We are providing more in house provision now, bringing more children out of county into our own residential homes. There is a move to try and get more foster carers and bring our children to be looked after by more foster carers.
“We’re making progress, fast progress probably not, not as much as we’d like. But, hopefully going forward, we can speed things up, but that’s one of our challenges going forward. But there is progress, but it basically shows what our priority is. We want our looked after children to be looked after in Wrexham
“Primarily, as I’ve said on many times, it’s for for the quality of care. Children want to be closer to home to where they’ve grown up. Obviously there are financial benefits, which are very, very important in this climate, but also in terms of children’s welfare, they’re secondary.”
We asked on the progress on the ‘care closer to home’, as it has been pointed to as a solution to very expensive care package placements out of county. We asked what would progress things further, and if a lack of capital to adapt and purchase properties was slowing the process.
Cllr Walsh said, “It is quite the opposite. We’re actually very good at getting the capital for it, but they’re coming tranches is the right way. They’ll wont just throw lots of money and say, go and buy five new homes. You have to apply for each one individually, and you have to be sensible about it.
“Even if we were given capital for five new residential homes, if we try to provide the new resident homes at once you have a staffing issue, because getting the right staff is not always as straightforward as it seems, so that takes time. So it’s important that we focus on opening a residential home, making sure it’s staffed, and then immediately move on to the next one, rather than doing it all in one go. Would I ideally like it to be faster? Yes, of course I would. But, I think, I think the rate we do them is the only pragmatic way of doing it”.
Speaking on agency reduction he added, “We have had a high number of agency staff, but we’ve managed to reduce that. When I took over as lead member the percentage was in the 80s, and now it is in the 40s which is remarkable. We haven’t finished yet. We still want to get those agency numbers as low as possible. I don’t we’ll ever get it to zero, but we want to get as close to that as possible. That is for consistency, as well as saving money at the same time. Our agency staff are brilliant – so much so we want them to come and work for us permanently!
Following on from that desire he added, “Our ‘Grow Your Own’ program, which our goal is we want people to become social workers. We want them to come from university, want them to start work here in Wrexham, and we want them to ideally stay in Wrexham for their whole career. I know that life doesn’t always work that way, but we would ideally like a commitment, and we want them to have long, fruitful careers with us, because I think that would, that would benefit the service, and it certainly benefits the children we look after.”
The report will be considered and probed by councillors later this morning at the Executive Board.
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