Changing roles and relationships – Workshop notes and resources (SCIE National Conference 2007)

The discussions around changing roles and relationships were defined and driven by participants of this session.

Prior to deciding on topics for discussion, participants were asked to highlight issues that they felt would benefit from further discussion and exchange of ideas around good practice.

Participants identified the following topics as issues that needed discussion:

• Exploration of different kinds of relationships in the social care sector
• Multidisciplinary working and interactions
• Difficulties in recruitment and retention in the independent domiciliary care sector, and recruitment and retention strategies
• Change and modernisation in the social care sector and subsequent change in roles and relationships
• Sharing of experience and ideas

Participants were then asked to narrow these discussion points into two topic areas for further exploration. They identified them as:

• How do we change culture and practice at the front line of social care?
• Developing shared vision in an inter agency / multi agency setting

For each of the above participants were asked to define the issues around the individual questions and identify solutions from their practice experience and share them with the group.

How do we change culture and practice at the front line?

Issues:

• A traditional focus on processes not outcomes
• Attitude of “too busy doing the day job” to address need for change in culture and practice
• Sometimes current changes challenge what people came into the job to do
• Low paid, low status workforce with low confidence
• Questions around whether we have the right workforce – we don’t always understand fully what motivates and drives people to work in front-line roles
• Difficulties in recruiting the right people with the right background and attitude
• Difficulties in introducing new approaches / services for some clients whilst continuing to provide traditional services for long standing clients who want this
• Broader societal changes increase need for change at the same time as increasing pressure on services – managing change becomes harder to achieve
• Pulling in different directions – it is difficult to address the current volume of change simultaneously
• Cost and resourcing of change and change management

Developing shared vision in an inter agency / multi agency setting

Issues:

• Difficulties ensuring joint ownership of inter-agency issues
• Inter-agency working can be seen as a challenge to current roles and expertise
• Failure to learn from existing good practice (e.g. lessons learned in youth offending or community mental health teams)
• Failure to acknowledge the sense of loss and threat that inter-agency working can cause
• Tendency to focus on structural change and on quick solutions rather than on longer-term cultural change

Both groups came together in the afternoon session for a joint discussion on potential solutions and the following were identified:

Solutions

• Leaders need to have and display a real passion for change and clearly explain reason for any change – there is a clear role here for leaders at every level to act as ‘sensemakers’ on behalf of their staff
• Service users need to be involved more in the change process – in helping to identify desired outcomes, to evaluate existing services and to develop new ways of working
• User involvement in training and education can be a particularly powerful way of demonstrating why services have to change
• Leaders need to build up respect and loyalty if change is to be successful
• Change often involves four separate stages – deciding on the need for change, preparing for change, carrying out the change and evaluating its impact.  Often, services tend to focus only on carrying out the change
• There needs to be greater attention to organisational development, change management, project management and evaluating outcomes
• Managers need to focus more on outcomes not just on processes – at times, there is a danger that we focus on current processes and lose sight of the real reason services are there in the first place
• There needs to be openness and honesty in all communication
• Managers can’t do everything themselves – often, there is considerable untapped expertise elsewhere that we do not access (e.g. social care may be struggling with strategic needs assessment, but colleagues in public health or economic development are already skilled at this and have detailed data)
• Current policy around registration, re-registration and CPD provides an opportunity to encourage staff to reflect on their practice and potentially to practise differently in future

What can SCIE do to help?

• Make the people management website more interactive to enable sharing of good practice
• Provide support for smaller independent organisations to understand current changes (for example, what is happening, why it is happening and what it means in practice)
• Continue to act as a champion for meaningful user involvement – this is of central importance and front-line services find it difficult to do
• Support front-line organisations to focus on delivering an outcomes-based approach
• Provide opportunity for users of the website to learn from other sectors (i.e. not just from social care)
• Continue work as a national advocate (for example, recent work around user involvement and benefits has been very positive)
• SCIE’s focus on both children and adults helps to provide a holistic approach and is important to maintain.

Resources

Integrated Care Network
www.integratedcarenetwork.gov.uk
Part of the Care Services Improvement Partnership, ICN aims to help frontline organisations to work together to deliver flexible services. The website includes a tool to support the assessment and development of partnership working in integrated teams, and discussion papers on culture in partnerships, governance and whole-systems working (located in ICN Advice).

Social Care Institute for Excellence
www.scie.org.uk
SCIE has a number of relevant resources, including
Choice, Control and Individual Budgets – Emerging Themes (Research Briefing)
Developing Social Care – the past, present and future (Position Paper)
Improving the use of research in social care practice (Knowledge Review)

Department of Health
www.dh.gov.uk
The policy and guidance section of the website includes some helpful documents and tools under HR and Training and Social Care (in Health and Social Care section). The social care section includes Denise Platt’s recent report, “The Status of Social Care – a review 2007”. Mental health also includes two new documents:
“Mental Health: new ways of working for everyone” – focussing on developing and sustaining a capable and flexible workforce
“Creating capable teams approach (CCTA)” – best practice guidance to support the implementation of New Ways of Working.

In Control
www.in-control.org.uk
A partnership working to define best practice in Self-Directed Support and change the social care system. The website includes case studies and a library of helpful documents.

Skills for Care
www.skillsforcare.org.uk
The website of the body responsible for the adult social care workforce includes some helpful tools to address induction and recruitment/retention issues.

Children’s Workforce Development Council
www.cwdcouncil.org.uk
CWDC have responsibility for the development of the children’s social care workforce, and their website includes a toolkit to help the development and implementation of an integrated children’s services workforce strategy.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families
www.dfes.gov.uk and www.everychildmatters.gov.uk
The material on Every Child Matters includes a range of useful toolkits for multi-agency services, a section on workforce reform, and guidance on information sharing.

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