Why and how?
National standards should explicitly prioritise the values underpinning our vision for better social care. Choice & control, belonging & relationships, inclusive places, meaning & purpose. Key focus areas for standards should ensure they are organised around key themes aligned with the vision including home & living arrangements, personalised support, community inclusion, wellbeing & fulfilment
To achieve this there must be serious & effective coproduction in the development of the standards. This must mean investment in real engagement with accessible methods, ongoing feedback & review with people & their organisations as standards are drafted & redrafted. In developing the means for monitoring & achieving accountability, measures must be devised that show how social care is meeting people’s aspirations with new regulation using criteria & approaches that reflect the vision’s values & ensure accountability to local people.
“Workforce” standards should be around person centred, relational approaches, community building, coproduction & collaboration skills, rewarding innovation in achieving outcomes in line with the vision.
The standards will require funding allocation mechanisms & legal & policy alignment. On funding this will mean models that promote early action for good lives & personalised community-based support as well as equitable access. On legal & policy alignment build the vision into Care Act principles so that statutory duties reflect the importance of home, relationships & the places we live. It will be vital to align social care standards with those in housing & health.
There are big risks that standards will freeze legacy approaches to social care, minimum standards that become maximum ones, constrain lives, crush better ways of doing things Instead let’s build them so that we can all live in the place we call home, with the people &
things we love, in communities where we look out for each other, doing the things that matter to us. Tricia has put together the following initial material from the day:
Standards for a National Care Service – setting the scene
Deborah Rozansky from SCIE and Laura Griffith from IMPACT helped set the scene with the thinking that has been going on about a National Care Service and more recently of national standards.
What do we all mean by standards?
Standards are part of all of our lives, but we generally don’t think about them – we just know they are there and assume that they are doing what they need to do. We spent some time in small groups thinking about what standards give us in our everyday lives.
What do we hope National Care Service standards will achieve?
We imagined it was 2030 and we have had standards for a National Care Service in place for 4 years ….and they are working amazingly! We thought about the difference they are making and what we need to be different about these new standards from the mechanism we already have.
Photos of what we said are here. Key themes emerged for us to focus on when proposing what standards should look like and how they might operate, to help rather than hinder the future we seek
What would we do to mess this up?
We had a bit of fun and thought about what we would tell the government to do it they really wanted to mess this up. There were A LOT of ideas!). Here are just a few (that’s a devil whispering on Wes’s shoulder…)
We explored what we’ve learned from the Social Care Future plumbing and wiring work that connects to National Care Service standards
Martin Cattermole, Andrew Reece and Rachel Mason shared some of the work that is going on as part of the Social Care Future plumbing and wiring work. This image summarises some of the key issues emerging.
National Care Service standards – setting out our stall
For the final session of the day and building on our thinking about what National Care Service standards must NOT do, and what we what we hope they will achieve, we thought about what they must include. Not the detail, but the headlines.
Some key themes are:
- Back to Care Act basics
- Focus on life
- Focus on community
- Timely support
- Co-production and user-led organisations
- Rights and control
- Financial equity
- Support for everyone
- Capture outcomes data
What next?
As the New Year starts, we will be reaching out to others for help and to collaborate on ensuring that at the work on the National Care Service starts, work on standards starts from a very different place – starting from the very different and better social care we are striving for, from the lives people want not from minimum standards for legacy services (our big fear). Now that the Casey Commission has been announced the starting gun has been fired. Get in touch if you want to be involved.