Care for the future
Adult social care is one of the most important things we do as a Council. We are reaching the next stage of an important piece of work which will transform the way we provide these services in Lewisham and improve outcomes for some of our most vulnerable residents.
Over the last six months, our adult social care teams have been working with experts to closely look at the care and support we provide for adults – this includes residents with a wide range of physical, mental and learning disabilities. As our population increases, we are supporting a growing number of people with ever more complex needs, so this work is really important.
The experts we have commissioned to carry out our independent review have successfully worked with a number of local authorities in London and across the country to improve services and make them more efficient. In Lewisham they’ve worked closely with 100 of our frontline staff, who have really thrown themselves behind the project and tell us they’re excited to make changes and begin working in different ways.
Our focus is on how we can transform and modernise our services to make sure we’re achieving the best results for the people we support – this means offering greater support sooner, working more closely with our partners, investing in our staff and giving them the tools to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
Going forward, a major area of work will be optimising how we use our resources, by working with NHS partners, voluntary and community organisations and other services within the Council. As a result we expect to provide more intensive early intervention support to enable people to live healthier and more independent lives for longer. This will not only increase people’s quality of life, but also allow us to be more efficient and reduce demand for higher dependency support later on – such as residential care. This is expected to save up to £7m of the £40m the Council needs to cut as a result of ongoing underfunding for vital services from central government.
We will be investing in our staff, to help them develop their professional skills and we will be looking at how we can improve our IT systems and free up social workers so they can spend more time with residents, rather than completing paperwork and admin.
We committed to this independent review because, while our staff work incredibly hard and support our residents brilliantly, we know that there are new approaches we can take to modernise our services and to help people to stay independent for longer. By seeking the expertise of those who’ve helped to roll these programmes out in other areas, we are learning from other councils’ journeys and adapting that learning to meet our residents’ needs here in Lewisham. It will also enable us to make the savings we need to make as a result of Government cuts and increasing demand for adult social care services.
Pending approval from Mayor and Cabinet later this month, we will soon progress to the next stage of this work – the design and implementation phase – and we look forward to sharing more details of this exciting project in the coming months.