A pioneering initiative has been launched to remind older people when to take vital medication. Health care professionals, social care or housing staff identify people who may benefit and a local pharmacist assesses their suitability for the scheme. The pharmacist discusses which medicines they are currently taking, any concerns they may have with taking medicine and then recommends whether or not the electronic reminder service should be installed.People enrolled on the scheme are provided with a Tunstall Lifeline 4000+, which automatically gives an audible and visual alert when it is time to take their medication. If the person does not press a key on the Lifeline unit to acknowledge the reminder within a set time, the unit will alert a monitoring centre, so that any necessary follow-up action can be taken.
Weakness in managing risk is often a major cause of failure in implementing IT projects as well as in more general change management programmes. In a move to understand how risk can be managed better the National School for Government is leading a project to find out more about outstanding practice in risk management. The sponsors of the project include DTI, DWP, ODPM, Food Standards Agency, Revenue and Customs, Home Office, IDeA, Cabinet Office and OGC.The study will bring together what is known about the management of innovation and risk in public service, the private sector and academic fields. The learning will then be checked out in organisations that consistently innovate and achieve extraordinary performance. The team will find out how decisions are taken to initiate change in these organisations, how the options are weighed up and how innovation is started.
By Ian Cole and Brendan Nevin The cause of neighbourhood decline is a complicated mix of factors including labour market change, lack of access to transport, failing schools and fear of crime. Housing market failure is a knock-on effect which accelerates decline. The authors explain how a Pathfinder programme is promoting housing market renewal and finding ways to connect to nearby areas of growth and economic vitality.
Pilot schemes have been set up to enable schools to give parents access to attendance information, assessment scores, homework diaries and student timetables on a secure web site. The schemes, which are operated by North Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire County Councils, put into action the DfEE’s commitment to make greater use of online media to improve communications between home and school.Using Parents Gateway, produced by Capita Education Services, parents can log on to a secure area of the school’s site to view their child’s latest test results or find out if they made it in to school safely. The data they view is extracted from the school’s management information system and the process does not require any human intervention from the school.
With opposition growing to the proposed changes in pensions for public sector workers a survey has shown that one outcome could be a stream of resignations and difficulty in recruiting replacements. The survey by Hays, the recruitment consultants, found that one third of finance professionals working in public services would consider moving to the private sector if the Government makes its proposed changes. Seventy per cent of the people surveyed believe they would be worse off under these plans, with 66 per cent viewing the changes as a direct attack on what are currently ‘gold standard’ pension schemes. Nearly half of those asked thought that changes to pensions would negatively affect their organisation’s ability to recruit and retain staff.The findings are directly in line with an earlier survey by the top civil servants union, the fda, which showed that 94% of members were against the introduction of a ‘whole career pension arrangement’ to replace the current ‘final salary’ schemes.
Read more on DIFFICULTY IN SELLING CHANGES IN PUBLIC SECTOR PENSIONS CONFIRMED…
This report from the Audit Commission is based on surveys of public and private sectors and it provides a snapshot of the level of ICT abuse, the reasons why it occurs and the risks that organisations need to address. Over the past 24 years, the trend in incidents suggests that ICT abuse continues to be a threat. While new types of incident have arisen, frauds, viruses and accessing inappropriate material on the internet now present the greatest risks to organisations.Organisations have improved their ICT governance arrangements with 96 per cent developing ICT security policies, 82 per cent employing email filtering; and 85 per cent employing staff with specific ICT security responsibilities. But there is less evidence of commitment to providing users with robust guidance and unambiguous statements about their responsibilities. Only half of the organisations surveyed have initiated ICT security awareness training and only one-fifth of staff have been provided with a copy of their organisation’s ICT security policy. Many organisations have responded to the range of risks they face by deploying more preventative measures, but there is still an alarming minority that fails to protect its information assets, whether through complacency or ignorance of risks.
In a move to develop a more holistic and joined up health service focused on patient need, Sir Nigel Crisp, Chief Executive of the NHS, has challenged senior managers to get personally involved to experience what it is like living in the gaps between services. As an action plan for the year he has asked that they each identify a patient with a long term condition or some sort of more complex need who lives in the community and uses one or more services. He made it clear that this should not be someone who is absolutely dependent and might be looked after by a community matron, but someone with more intermittent needs. He then wants them to follow the experiences of the person throughout the year and at the end of this monitoring to report to their own Boards on what they discovered. This he believes will give Boards a different perspective and maybe help them think and act a lot differently.As an explanation of the challenge he described the case of a man in his 70s. He is diabetic, recently widowed, wants to give up smoking and has a problem with his knees. No one apart from his daughter was concerned about his whole health. No one communicated between all the services – it wasn’t the responsibility of the GP nor of the nurse in the diabetic clinic.
Read more on HEALTH MANAGERS CHALLENGED TO LOOK AT SERVICE GAPS…
The campaign for ‘new localism’ to allow councils to take a more strategic view and give them greater discretion in how resources are used has taken a major step forward with the roll out of new funding arrangements. Over 20 councils piloted Local Area Agreements from July last year and demonstrated that the new arrangements can successfully bring together local priorities with those of the Government. The Agreements simplify the number of funding streams from central government. By focusing on a core set of outcomes for an area, they significantly simplify the arrangements which have previously been in place, and give councils much greater freedom to spend on local priorities. The success of the pilot has resulted in a nationwide roll out of Agreements with 66 councils being brought into the scheme this year and the remaining larger councils by 2007.Each Local Area Agreement will be negotiated with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and it will be focused around the four blocks of children and young people, safer and stronger communities, healthier communities and older people and economic development and enterprise. The remaining 13 areas will be structured around a single pot. The effect of this will be to reduce bureaucracy by bringing together over 100 different funding streams. On average councils will report on 64 targets instead of several hundred and this will allow them to focus on meeting local community needs. Each Agreement will have a three year life span.
This report from the Learning Disability Task Force reviews progress of the ‘Valuing People’ initiative and looks at how the ‘person centred’ approach to supporting people with disabilities is being developed. It warns that the journey towards full citizenship is not complete and barriers continue to exist. There are 800,000 adults with learning disabilities in England, 2.2% of the adult population, and expenditure on services accounts for around £1.6bn, 3.4% of NHS expenditure and £2.25bn, 14.8%, of Local Authority Social Services expenditure. There is also major public expenditure in housing, education, employment services and through a range of specialist funding streams and yet the needs of people with learning disabilities are repeatedly given insufficient priority by statutory organisations.The report seeks to improve knowledge about the numbers and needs of people, uses of current financial expenditure, and the need for increased and more transparent expenditure in the future. It emphasises the need for unity of thinking around strategic intent, funding allocations and performance review.
Local councils are committed to making efficiency gains totalling 1.28 bn in the current financial year. This is higher than the government target of £1.03 bn. The figures are derived from an analysis of the Forward Look Annual Efficiency Statements. The savings are part of the response to the government’s overall drive to make significant efficiency and effectiveness gains recommended by Sir Peter Gershon last year. Over half of the efficiencies will come from individual service departments such as Social Services, and the remainder from activities either supporting or cutting across several direct services to the public.Sir Jeremy Beecham chair of the Efficiency Task Group in the Local Government Association said: “These figures do not reflect a sudden reaction on the part of councils to a Gershon agenda. Year after year local authorities have protected services and kept council tax down by both budgeting for, and delivering, increased efficiency. But one of the advantages of the national focus on this is that the central collection of these figures gives us the evidence we need to show our long-held commitment to cost effectiveness.