In 2021, we established the VCSE Collaborative Board – a new partnership board made up of key VCSE organisations across the county, with the purpose of jointly working to improve services to customers and carers.
In early 2022, we co-designed a new Adult Social Care Strategy – ‘The life you want to lead’. Through 10 workshops with staff and partners, 10 focus groups with customers and carers, and a survey that prompted over 1,000 responses, we were able to jointly develop a four-year strategy that reflects the voices of the people who receive support, their carers, and residents. As such, the strategy has been the guide for both what we work on together and how we work together. It has led to collaborative work on commissioning, early support and prevention.
Each year, the service undertakes a review and refresh of its Business Plan, with key priorities set out for delivery in the coming year, and the measures that will be used to monitor our performance. This is revisited at regular points throughout the year to determine our progress against our key identified activities.
The council’s Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) supports business and financial planning over the next five years. It describes the council’s priorities and outcomes, the financial position and risks and uncertainties.
The Adults' Services Commissioning Strategy sets out our high-level commissioning principles and intentions and acts as a guide to everyone we work with on what will be required to meet the needs of adults drawing on care and support in the future. The strategy provides the overarching direction for partners and adult social care providers across the county, to deliver the priorities set out in the council’s corporate plan and the co-designed Adult Social Care Strategy through to 2025. The Commissioning Strategy aligns with other strategic plans including the Sussex Integrated Care System Strategy, the Carers Strategy and the Changing Futures Programme, and it will shape future iterations of joint health and social care priorities in West Sussex.
The Assistant Director - Improvement Assurance (Principal Social Worker) is Caldicott Guardian for Adults’ Services. They are supported by the service’s Policy and Data Protection Manager, who advises them on all aspects relating to data privacy and appropriate data sharing. The Caldicott Guardian approves the responses to requests for personal data from partners. including the police and government agencies, before these can be issued. They also review all requests for third party read-only access to Mosaic from partners to ensure access is justified and appropriate.
The Policy and Data Protection Manager works on all aspects of data protection, including the development of Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), Information Sharing Agreements, and updates to public information and the service’s privacy statement. Recent significant projects have included establishing a process for adding the local Parent Carer Forum to the membership of the Transition Panel. This included the creation of role profiles, confidentiality agreements and a DPIA to ensure appropriate access control of care record information. The Manager is a member of the corporate Information Governance Group.
The service has comprehensive guidance in place for obtaining consent to share customer stories for internal and external purposes, to ensure compliance with GDPR and data protection legislation. The guidance was created in consultation with the corporate Data Protection Team and is owned by the Caldicott Guardian.
As part of the Project Management Office’s project initiation process, the DPIA pre-screening questionnaire must be completed for all projects and, where required, a full DPIA must be completed and submitted to the Portfolio Board for review and sign-off prior to initiation.
Learning, improvement and innovation
“We focus on continuous learning, innovation and improvement across our organisation and the local system. We encourage creative ways of delivering equality of experience, outcome and quality of life for people. We actively contribute to safe, effective practice and research.”
The WSSAB has undertaken several multi-agency audits as part of its work programme. The aim of these audits was to evaluate and reflect on practice, learn from experience, inform multi-agency practice development, and strengthen multi-agency working. Action plans have been developed and learning from these can be found here.
All audit action plans are overseen by a Quality & Practice Subgroup. The Adults’ Quality Assurance Lead participates in the action planning meetings and ensures that application of learning can be quickly and effectively embedded into the service. An additional step has been introduced by the WSSAB that timetables a further review of learning activity and surveys all participating partners to establish the difference the learning has made.
In addition to audits being undertaken at a local and partnership level, we have introduced a learning review process. This is used when the circumstances do not meet the criteria for a formal SAR but would benefit from a more focused look at practice.
Serious Incident Reviews and Learning Reviews offer us the opportunity to study in detail the background, decisions and actions taken that lead to circumstances in which a person had a poor health and wellbeing outcome. This analysis enables us to understand where improvements can be made at systems level. Action plans are developed, and these are monitored by the Quality Assurance Lead.
The Learning Disability Mortality Review (LeDeR) process informs our Quality Assurance process. Action plans are developed through the review mechanism, implemented, and monitored as required via our Quality Assurance Management Board. This process evidences our approach to learning and partnership working, as highlighted in the quote below:
“WSCC is seen within the Sussex LeDeR stakeholder group as a leading example of quality improvement, creating their own quality improvement process from the information gained from the LeDeR Reviews, applying learning and actions to their organisation transparently and effectively with consistent and professional communication between teams”.
- Sussex ICB Learning from Lives and Death Reviewer
The service is at the forefront of the council’s first stages of utilisation of AI and is focussed on exploring the technology to help us in three ways – to manage demand, release capacity, and improve customer experience.
A workshop on our potential use of AI was held as part of the 2024 staff conference. This was focussed on explaining the technology to staff and exploring potential applications in the service, within the context of the Oxford Statement on the responsible use of AI in social care. Attendees were asked to comment on potential opportunities for the technology to improve routine processes and broader ways of working in the service, and to consider practical and ethical issues.
Since then, we have launched our first application - an AI-powered chatbot Assistant for staff that will answer questions related to social care practice and policies, using the guidance and documents held on our online ‘Professional Zone’. This will make it easier and quicker for staff to access the specific information they need to complete work tasks and advise customers.
The Staff Assistant was extensively tested with colleagues prior to launch, to ensure accuracy and reliability, so staff could have confidence in its answers. It is now widely available as a ‘beta’ test version, enabling staff to use the technology, whilst providing feedback to help further enhance its operation.
We are now in the process of developing a customer version of the AI Assistant. This will be pre-loaded with answers to the questions most frequently asked by customers contacting our Adults’ CarePoint contact centre, and aims to match questions to the most appropriate answer. The Assistant will provide a faster response to queries, enhancing customer experience whilst freeing capacity for our call centre staff to focus on more complex calls. This is in the early stages of testing. Feedback has helped to shape ongoing exploration of further opportunities for the appropriate use of AI in the service, and we will continue to work collaboratively with staff and stakeholders as our plans progress.
A recent podcast of service officers discussing what AI is, the ways it could benefit the council and some of the challenges it presents can be found here.