Making it Real in Stockport Council
by Natalie Valios
Personalisation became the buzzword in Stockport a few years ago. But with fewer external mechanisms in place to evaluate a council’s progress, Jude Wells, Service Manager (Personalisation), was aware of the need to find another tool to monitor how well they were doing.
“We used to be monitored and rated by the Care Quality Commission but now it’s more about self-assessment,” she says. “Although that accountability framework has gone, we wanted to continue doing a stocktake and decided that Making it Real (MiR) would be a good tool to use as an internal audit to look at what we have done to date and what we need to do next. It is about saying to your citizens ‘this is how we think we are doing and this is what we need to do better’. It helps with our business plan, feeds into the Local Account and suits our direction of travel.”
The first step was to get agreement from the council’s transformation board to sign up to MiR. Consent came in spring 2012 and once everyone was on board, the prescribed process on the website was “clear and helpful”, says Jude. “It can be daunting when you first set about getting on the website. But our best advice is just to get on with it and don’t overthink it. Just remember that Making it Real and the support tools on the website are essentially a good conversation starter.”
The council held a number of planning workshops with people who use services, carers and other stakeholders to start identifying its three key priorities from MiR’s 26 “I” statements.
“We learnt that when you have the conversation with people, make sure it is properly planned. We tried a big forum approach with a variety of stakeholders but it didn’t work for all groups of people. It might be better to hold smaller groups and make sure everyone knows why they are there and what role they are going to play.”
At the workshops attendees identified and scored areas that needed to be improved and from that, agreed the three categories from which it will choose its “I” statements at a later stage. The categories are information and advice; active and supportive communities; and personal budgets and self-funding.
Jude says that the ‘I’ statements challenged “our thinking because a lot of the things that came up are actually about networks and community engagements – things that aren’t necessarily our core business or things we have considered before”.
The council is also using the POET national survey on personal budgets to engage more widely with people who use services and carers and the feedback from this will help identify the three “I” statements it will chose as its priority areas and then shape the development of its action plan.
“The POET survey has complementary overlaps with Making it Real and it will capture opinions from individuals who don’t want, or are not able, to attend workshops, giving us more quality data as a result,” says Jude.
The action plan is not expected to be ready for another month or so, but discussions are already taking place as to how the council will achieve its three chosen priorities. For the information and advice priority, the feeling was that more needs to be done to reach those without internet access and those who aren’t accessing the council’s support systems.
“We have commissioned the third sector consortium Flag to provide information and advice to those on the fringes of our eligibility criteria. This includes signposting to free or low-cost services and activities offered by local independent, voluntary or community organisations.”
And in terms of helping people feel more involved with their community, the council is looking at developing a timebank model where people share their skills and experience and are active citizens in a community.
“There is a disconnect between some people who use services and where they live, for example, some adults with learning disabilities are living in tenancies where they are not active members of their neighbourhoods, but they would like to be. The same is true for many older people and we are hoping that timebanking will help.”
To help people who have personal budget, plans are afoot for a brokerage model and a peer support model. “Some older people don’t embrace personal budgets so we will be encouraging those who have personal budgets to share their stories with those who currently don’t use them, but could benefit from them.”
During the process, Jude says there have been no obstacles to being part of Making it Real because “our leadership team is very committed to personalisation as a model for delivering social care”.
Instead, the challenges will come from capacity and resources, she says. “We need to make sure we have the right staff in the right place. We need to evidence value for money so doing things better with this in mind is a key driver.
“People often want an evidence base before they try something out but sometimes you just have to try something new to see if it works and learn from doing things in a different way. Convincing people of that may be a challenge. Also, mobilising communities – particularly those ones who may have a negative view of social care or the council – will be difficult.
“And we have to get over people’s barriers about co-production. It is a new relationship with providers. We are not commissioning and contracting like we have before; what we are trying to do now is more collaborative.”
This is already working with several local providers, including domiciliary care agencies and Age UK Stockport, which have been so impressed with what they have learnt about MiR through Stockport Council that they have also signed up. “It is a good dialogue tool to engage with them to do things differently,” says Jude.
As for the future, she says, “We will ensure that Making it Real is wedded into our local business plans and next year we anticipate identifying more areas to work on and having more dialogue with people who use services.”
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CASE STUDY
Parents in Partnership Stockport (PiPS) – a group for parents and carers who have children or young people with disabilities or additional needs – was one of the organisations invited to attend the planning workshops.
PiPS works to improve services in Stockport for children and young people and liked the sound of Making it Real because “it is working towards everything that we had hoped for for the future”, says co-Chair Sherann Hillman.
She feels that movement around personalisation has been a bit stop and start but is confident that with MiR “it’s going to happen this time”.
“We have been completely involved all the way through in choosing the three top priorities. For us, the key issue is being able to access the right information. There is a huge lack of information, particularly when children go through the transition from children’s to adult services. Families want to know what’s out there, even if they aren’t going to meet the criteria for lots of support, they need to know because at least they can plan for that.
“They need easy and accessible advice that is available in one place because at the moment they don’t know where to go.”
Families are excited about the idea of personalisation and personal budgets, she says, “which is why the council needs to get it right and give them the choice and control over their lives”.
“We know what success would look like and we believe that Making it Real is the future. The legacy will be that people can live the way they want to and it stays that way.
We are working in co-production with the council to make this happen and the council is involving us as much as it can because it’s only going to work if we do this together. That’s the only way to make it real.”
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October 2012