The heads of social services have welcomed a report today from the Alzheimer’s Society and say many of its recommendations are achievable. The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has also said training is essential to ensure all care is brought up to the standards set by the best providers.

The Alzheimer’s Society study brands much of the care provided for people suffering with dementia as very poor and says a disturbing proportion is ‘absolutely appalling’. It also points to the claims of care staff that there is little specialist training available and too little money to encourage its provision.

Jenny Owen, co-chair of ADASS’s older people’s committee, said many of the recommendations inn the Society’s report were reasonable, doable and if they were implemented they would dramatically improve the quality of life for many elderly people and their carers. She said it was as important as it was gratifying to see attention being focused on the growing numbers of people with Alzheimer’s and the challenges that posed for older people, their carers and for residential, home care and extra care housing services.

“We must remember that the quality of some residential care is very high, as the Society’s report recognises. Our efforts must, though, be aimed at getting all our services up to that same high quality by concentrating as much of our energies as we can on training, training, training. We fully accept the Society’s recommendation that we should commission for quality services.”

Staff caring for people with dementia needed access, she said, to highly skilled specialist advice and support. The ADASS has made its views, which were similar to those of the Alzheimer’s Society’s, clear to Lord Darzi’s inquiry into the NHS and Directors were also contributing substantially to the National Dementia Strategy, which is due to report next Autumn.

“It is recognised and broadly accepted that recent resource settlements for adult social services have not made rising to these challenges any easier. At the same time there is no excuse for us nationally not looking at more efficient ways of how we can use all the resources available to us within the health and social care system in order to help improve the quality of life for so many older, and not so older, people,” Jenny Owen added

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Five priorities have been set out for local authorities to deal with workforce challenges. The 2007 Local Government Workforce Strategy has been launched by the Local Government Association, the Improvement and Development Agency and the Local Government Employers and sets out action needed locally, regionally and nationally.

This is the fourth version of the strategy, examining the challenges facing council leaders and chief executives as well as human resources specialists over the next five years.

The priority areas are organisational development to build workforce support for new ways of working; leadership and management development to develop visionary leadership making best use of the political and managerial role in a partnership context; developing skills and knowledge in an innovative, high performance, multi-agency context; working with partners to address skill shortages, promoting careers and addressing diversity issues and reviewing pay and rewards so they reflect new structures and priorities and reinforce high performance. The Strategy also encourages regions and local authorities to come up with appropriate responses to their own workforce challenges.

Simon Milton, Chairman of the LGA, said the strategy was necessary to deliver the sustained transformation needed to achieve faster, fitter, more flexible, citizen focused and personalised local public services. Meanwhile Joan Munro, the national advisor for workforce strategy at the IDeA added, “Providing the best services to residents and making local areas better places to live and work cannot be separated from effective people management. Local government faces many challenges, financially, in terms of targets, and in ways of working, and if they are to succeed there needs to be an understanding of how to achieve a high performing motivated workforce in an increasingly competitive labour market.”

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By Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos

This book is an essential resource for grassroots organizers and leaders, students of activism and advocacy, and anyone trying to increase the civic participation of ordinary people. The authors share stories and tools from their nationally recognized and award-winning work of building a community-led organization, training community leaders, and conducting campaigns that changed public policy and delivered concrete results to tens of thousands of people.

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