Thurrock Council prepares adult services for personalisation

Thurrock Council has overhauled its adult social care department as part of its implementation of personalisation.

Social workers will stop doing assessment and care management apart from in complex or safeguarding cases, each of which will be handled by separate new teams.

In other cases, “community solutions workers” – drawn from the council’s initial response team – will help users assess their needs and plan their support, with resulting support and commissioning plans checked by social workers in a new quality development team.

The changes are a prelude to the introduction of a new case management IT system – the integrated adults system. Users will be able to fill in an online self-assessment, which goes straight on to the system.

IAS programme manager Jon Carter said the virtue of the system, developed by IT firm Liquidlogic, was that it was designed to meet the councils’ practice needs, rather than vice versa, and will enable users to define their needs, rather than be led by prescribed questions and answers.

Thurrock has also developed a programme to train staff in their new roles and is working with Skills for Care to develop it into a nationally recognised qualification framework.

Lorna Payne, corporate director for community well-being at Thurrock, described the new system as “revolutionary.”

“These exciting developments will really put the citizen at the heart of care planning traditionally controlled through the assessment and care management era,” she said.

•  Thurrock will be holding a ‘Showcasing Adult Social Care’ day in June. Email Jon Carter  for more details.

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More information

Details on the changes in Thurrock