Picture Peter Kindersley
Dorset Council and its residents are to play an important role in informing how adult social care will be provided in the future.
The council was selected to work with the Department of Health and Social Care on a unique partnership to examine how our residents are referred into adult social care and how their experience could be improved.
The time-limited partnership launched in September and will finish in mid-December 2022 and what is discovered could be used to change the way people across the UK access social care.
This blog below comes from Tessa Fearnley, Delivery Manager in the Digital Policy Unit at the Department of Health and Social Care, introducing an overview of the project and its team.
At the end of the project, we will publish another blog to update you on our findings. You can also read more about the project here: Leading national way forward with Adult Social Care – Dorset Council news
Understanding how user-centred design could help ease pressures on adult social care by Tessa Fearnley
After weeks of planning, we have launched our Department of Health and Social Care and Dorset Council adult social care partnership.
We want to find out how we could reduce the workload in adult social care through user-centred design, so that local authorities like Dorset Council are better equipped to manage the planned changes to the adult social care system.
Who are we?
We are a multidisciplinary team of digital experts from Department of Health and Social Care and colleagues from Dorset Council. Our partnership gives us unique access to the council and allows us to tap directly into local knowledge as we conduct research with service users, develop our understanding of the council’s processes and systems and model potential solutions.
What are we doing?
Working closely with people using the service, we want to understand how we could reduce the workload for social workers and other people involved in providing Dorset Council’s adult social care service.
Our aspiration is to go beyond the limits of a traditional discovery. We would like to co-create and test an idea that works for people looking for social care. This is a bit of an experiment, and we are excited to find out how it will play out.
Why are we doing it now?
The Government is making changes to the adult social care system from October 2023. This changes when people will be able to get help from their council and how much they will have to pay.
The changes will increase the demand on local authorities particularly around care needs and financial assessments.
Care assessments help councils understand the care needs of a person and how best to meet them. Local authorities across England already have large backlogs of these assessments.
There are many factors behind the backlogs, including accumulation of work after Covid and challenges of filling vacancies in the sector. The workload for social workers is expected to grow and as a result waiting time for care assessments could go up.
Simply speaking, the problem we are trying to solve is how we can process all these additional assessments without adding to the backlog?
What are we doing at the moment?
We have just completed our fifth round of user research – the most important aspect of a discovery – and are analysing insights from interviews with service users, carers and local authority staff. We plan to do at least six rounds of research to understand the needs, problems and context for all users of the service.
Working with people directly involved in the process, we will then use these findings to come up with ideas for how to improve the service.
How are we working?
We are working in the open by hosting fortnightly online sessions in which the team shares updates for interested parties such as other local authorities, as well as sending weekly updates about our exciting journey.
Our ambition is to share our findings widely and make them reusable across multiple local authorities.
Want to find out more?
Please get in touch with us by emailing: dhsc-dorset-ascpartnership@dhsc.gov.uk if you want to find out more, attend our show and share or collaborate with us.
I have worked in communications for 25 years, first as a journalist and then in public and private sector public relations. From Southampton originally, I have lived in beautiful Dorset for the last two decades. My passion for Dorset has also turned into a passion for landscape photography. My other great loves are my family and Southampton Football Club.