One of key recommendations of the Munro Review of Child Protection: A Child centred system, published earlier this year was for local services to be freed from government targets, national IT systems and regulations, and allowed to design their own services and procedures. However, in a time of severe budgetary cuts and constraints this recommendation has unnerved some social care organisations, being construed as an expensive route to improving efficiencies. Undoubtedly, organisations will want to continue to see service improvements, and more tangible benefits in the form of cash savings and intangible benefits including improved employee performance, but they will need to fund these from a new slim line budget.

Enhancing mobile working is a cost effective way for organisations to achieve both these hard and soft benefits. With this in mind, OLM Systems, the UK’s largest independent solutions provider for children’s and adult services, has unveiled the CareMobile App Store. It delivers mobile functionality through easy to use, bite size apps, providing frontline social workers with online and offline access to case information whilst away from the office.

“In agreement with Munro’s call to free social workers of lengthy administrative burdens, Nushra Mansuri, professional officer for the British Association of Social Workers and the College of Social Work (BASW/CoSW) has echoed the frustrations of many: “ Social workers are prevented from working directly with the people who need their services and…are under extraordinary added pressure from deep funding cuts.” The pressure on organisations to be more efficient has trickled-down from management to frontline workers. However, with administrative obligations and off site travel unavoidable, little headway has been made towards improvement.

A recent ROI study for a social care department identified potential savings of over £300,000 by introducing mobile working. This included savings of 2.5 hours per social worker, per week from saved travel time, a reduction in time typing up notes, and savings on mileage claims (approximately 20 miles per week, however, rural areas can generate even greater travel savings). In the current climate, these savings cannot simply be overlooked. In addition to providing real savings, innovative mobile working technology can both increase productivity and enable social workers to spend more time with vulnerable adults, children and their families.

Crucial development

Following a successful development partner programme, including Devon County Council and Hull City Council, the CareMobile App Store is now on general availability.

The App Store runs inside the mobile device’s browser, and delivers a wide variety of social care apps to enable mobile working across the entire social care team. Functions are broken down into individual, easy to use apps, ensuring that the relevant ones are delivered to the right staff on demand. This ensures minimal user training. They are available on all platforms, including tablet, netbook and smartphone, and are fully offline functional, which means that encrypted data is cached securely on the device. This enables the user to continue working without having to worry about having an internet connection.

The App Store currently includes the following apps:
? ‘Assessments’ enables forms to be downloaded and completed whilst with a client or directly afterwards
? Existing case notes can be viewed and new ones created in ‘Observations’
? ‘Find person’ enables client records to be searched
? Via ‘Person details’ users can view person information including addresses, telephone numbers, relationships, classification and roles. Warnings are also displayed which has an important role to play for personal safety
? ‘Create person’ captures the details for a new client, whilst avoiding any duplication
? ‘Briefcase’ enables a number of client records to be downloaded in anticipation of being out of network range
? ‘Messages’ allows messages to be viewed and created while on the move
? ‘Lone worker’ provides a facility to generate SMS or email alerts either from an alarm button or a timed function

Addressing challenges

Councils want to know the savings they stand to make before committing to or implementing any new solutions, which is understandable particularly in the current economic climate. This is something we are happy to do for them, after which a pilot project can be initiated before the full roll out takes place. At each stage the benefits can be established and ROI projections calculated.

Undoubtedly, mobile working can lead to hard cash savings and the CareMobile App Store can certainly help with meeting many of the challenges associated with this objective. It also gives councils an opportunity to radically transform the way case recording administration is supported.

In areas with poor 3G access, a signal cannot always be guaranteed when visiting clients in their homes, and may be lost completely if the home is located within a block of flats. The CareMobile apps are fully offline tolerant, meaning data can still be recorded even when there is no signal.
Historically, technology has been viewed as a barrier to client interaction. Social workers had seen the twin requirements of focusing and spending time with families, whilst systematically recording their involvement, as being mutually incompatible. Nowadays slim line technology and simple to use apps have gained support from social workers as the technology is unobtrusive and the social worker can record quickly and efficiently in the front line, thus resolving this issue.

The benefits

Probably the most noted benefit amongst organisations is the cash savings made on office space, travel time and administration time.

The App Store gives frontline workers the mobility to bypass the office and go straight from home to the client; it increases their flexibility to work from anywhere. Not only does this mean that their work/life balance is improved, but it also means that they are spending less time on the road and more time with their clients. In turn, client engagement is also improved as, when appropriate, clients can see their comments being recorded as they speak thus making them feel more involved (this is most evident with older children).

Employee performance is also improved as the App Store allows them to speed up the completion of assessments, employ greater accuracy when logging information, and helps them to meet performance targets. In addition, it also increases morale amongst social workers by helping them to feel more professional and in control.

The App Store itself requires minimal user training as a simple and modern interface is provided. It is also available for multiple platform formats and can be accessed via Tablet, laptop or Slate, with the option of keyboard or handwriting recognition, and also Smartphones.

The solution, designed with simplicity at its heart, ensures frontline workers gain valuable time, have access to client records on the move and record information more accurately. Introducing innovative mobile working technology to adult social care teams will increase productivity and promote joint health and social care working. This ensures that the availability of social workers and their expertise is maximised to improve the quality of care offered.”

Caroline Cozier is the product manager with OLM Systems.

The Commission believes that, so far, councils have responded well to these challenges. Auditors have some confidence that most will balance their books this year. Many have also protected the most vulnerable people in their area. But with more reductions to come, and wider economic problems intensifying the pressure, councils need to prepare for a potentially rocky road ahead.

‘Good financial management and the continued search for efficiency savings will help councils navigate their way through this period, but they will also need to make some tough decisions about how to bridge the funding gap in the coming years.’

Local government faces three more years of cuts in government funding with almost 60 per cent of the total reductions yet to come. To meet this future challenge the report finds that some elements of councils’ cost-reducing strategies will have to change. In the larger councils almost half of this year’s savings will come from planning, housing and cultural services, but these only cover 16 per cent of service spending. These services cannot deliver similar savings every year. Many councils will face difficult decisions about how to meet their funding shortfall in the next few years.

Strong leadership and financial management mean that most councils should balance the books this year. However, many have had to cut back on services to secure their financial stability. Most local authorities are taking the right steps to make efficiency savings but have also had to reduce the quality and quantity of services. Charges are going up in many councils.
Although most councils are coping, the report finds that a minority of councils were considered by auditors to be ‘at risk’ of not meeting their budget for 2011/12.

The common characteristic of these councils is a combination of financial and managerial issues. Facing large funding reductions is not, on its own, enough to cause auditors to worry about a council’s financial resilience. It is councils with both big funding reductions and weak financial management that are at most risk of not achieving their budget. ‘At risk’ councils were less likely to have thoroughly evaluated their savings proposals and were more likely to use short-term financial fixes.

Tough times can be downloaded here.

The warning was prompted by a report from the NAO on progress in cutting costs in central government. Margaret Hodge highlighted the weaknesses in the way departments are managed, including lack of vision of how they will work with less money and poor understanding of the relationship between spending and outcomes. There is also no consistent way to measure progress in seeking efficiency across government.

The NAO report reveals that departments cut spending by 2.3 per cent in 2010/11, but they need to cut a further 19 per cent over the four years to 2014-15. To achieve this saving fundamental changes will be needed to secure sustainable reductions on the scale required. A major difficulty in achieving this target is that there are gaps in departments’ understanding of costs and risks, making it more difficult to identify how to deliver activities and services at a permanently lower cost.

Looking behind the mandarin speak this means that gathering the low hanging fruits is relatively easy and quick and does not need much imagination. But once this harvest is over, cost cutting becomes a completely different ballgame.

The NAO was unable to find out how far spending reductions represented year-on-year changes in efficiency and whether front-line services were affected. It concluded that forward plans are not based on a strategic view.

Departments’ financial data on basic spending patterns is sufficient to manage budgets in-year, but information about the consequences of changes in spending is less good. Longer term reform is a Cabinet Office priority and departments will need to look beyond short-term cost cutting measures and make major operational change.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said today: “Government departments have been successful in cutting costs and managing within their reduced spending allocations for 2010-11. However, most departments will need to cut their spending by much more over the next four years. This will not be possible without their recognizing that short-term measures are not enough and that fundamental changes are needed.”

The findings of the NAO are in line with the Audit Commission’s findings relating to local goverment.

Some 150 councils have so far indicated that they will take the freeze grant offer. They include Hammersmith and Fulham, South Oxfordshire, Stratford-on-Avon, Tendring and Windsor and Maidenhead which will reduce their council tax.

Council tax bills more than doubled since 1997 until last year’s freeze. This is the second year the Government has offered support to freeze council tax to support local residents, families and pensioners.

The Government has set aside up to £675 million for local authorities in England to help keep council tax down. Last year’s freeze saved households up to an estimated £72 on a Band D bill, and this year’s freeze could potentially do the same.

This new support builds on the offer taken up by all councils last year boosting what they could get over four years to £3.3 billion if they hold council tax for a second year.

The level of concern at the lack of response to the offer is shown by Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles who said: “Every councillor still to decide (on the level of council tax) has an obligation to keep the living costs of their residents down and take the freeze money. A vote against a freeze is a vote for a punitive tax-rise when typical bills are already around £120 a month.”

The pension reforms just negotiated will make little or no difference to the long-term costs of public service pensions. The savings from higher pension ages are, on average, offset by other elements of the pensions becoming more generous. In general lower earners in the public sector will actually get a more generous pension as a result of the recently announced reforms. That is, they will be able to retire at age 65 with a higher annual pension than they would receive under current arrangements. This results from the move from final salary to career average schemes and the particular changes to accrual and indexation rules.

Conversely higher earners are likely to lose out. The move from final salary to career average relatively penalises those who see big increases in their earnings over time. By increasing the generosity to lower earners – a group less likely to have a good employer pension in the private sector – the reforms increase the difference between the public and the private sectors.

However, the taxpayer has already started to benefit from the move from RPI to CPI indexation of public service pensions, introduced by the government in the October 2010 Spending Review. This will substantially reduce costs.

On pay, the IFS study found that at the end of the two-year public pay freeze and the two year of 1% pay increases, public pay will return to where it was relative to private sector pay in 2008. This is because private sector pay reacted quickly to the recession. Pay in the public sector did not.

The IFS findings have been challenged. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “The big increase in contributions immediately reduces the cost of public sector pensions by taking a big chunk out of most public servants’ pay. But if you take the package as a whole there can be no doubt that many public sector workers may have to pay more, work longer and get a pension that will not keep up with the proper measure of the cost of living.

The Treasury dispute the finding that the proposed pension arrangements will not save any money.

The Guide makes it clear from the outset that Total Place is not a service improvement initiative nor is it a cost-cutting exercise. It is an approach to ‘public value’ that includes both improvement and innovation and a close eye on the value to the citizen being generated by each public service pound spent. It is also an attempt to bring all of the contributors to public value together in one place.

Total Place is different from the myriad initiatives that have washed over the bows during the last twenty years because it is the first time that two crucial triads have been brought together in a single piece of work. The task triad is made up of customers, counting and culture. The player triad is formed by agencies, citizens and Whitehall. The ‘task’ of Total Place has been to consider all these key aspects in the creation of public value.

The design of Total Place has been to create as much connection between the different players in public value as possible. No one agency in a place or department in Whitehall has dictated the work.

Total Place has demonstrated that local partnerships can create the relationships and space necessary to enable the community to act collectively to implement the decisions made.

The Total Place Practitioners Guide can be downloaded here .

His group coaching model, incorporating living case studies, has been developed over more than 20 years of delivering programs to top-level executives and sets the standard in the field of leadership group coaching.

Written for coaches, consultants, leadership development directors, and anyone working in or with teams, The Hedgehog Effect begins with an in-depth analysis of what teams and groups are all about. The intricacies of leadership coaching are illustrated with an elaborate example of a team coaching intervention.

In Part Two, the author applies a psychodynamic lens to the dynamics of teams and groups, taking a close look at relationship patterns, how groups evolve, and the phenomenon of the group-as-a-whole. Part Three takes a more systemic perspective, addressing the challenges that change processes pose for people in organizations, and how to create best places to work. Kets de Vries supports the whole with the story of an organizational change initiative accomplished through group coaching.

Published by Jossey Bass. ISBN: 978-1-1199-7336-2. £29.99

The review looked at 25 local authorities and provides an early insight into how local government is coping with the severe contraction in grant income implemented after the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review. It finds a strong likelihood that the contraction of local government service provision will be felt differently across England. Analysis of the patterns of spending cuts show greater cuts in the most deprived authorities, compared with the most affluent.

The report also points to conflict over whether the needs of vulnerable people should be prioritised. Only half the sample had adopted ‘protecting the needs of the most vulnerable client or communities’ as a principle guiding budgetary decision-making and just two suggested that ‘protecting deprived neighbourhoods’ was a priority.

The report suggests that the consequences of the cuts for disadvantaged people in the poorest areas will also quite possibly be overlooked. Councils are struggling to assess the impact of the cuts they make to services, due to lack of capacity. The authors believe that the cuts made by local government in future should be monitored to ensure that the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable people are addressed.

Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: “This report is part of our programme looking at how disadvantaged people and places are coping in this time of austerity. This report finds that vulnerable people are being hit with the double impact of faster cuts, and lack of protection. While we accept that local authorities need to make spending cuts, it is essential that people in communities that are already struggling do not suffer more than others.”

Researchers also found that the most deprived authorities lost most spending power, especially in the first year, while some affluent areas faced only mild initial cuts. The front-loading of the cuts, the failure to target the needs of deprived authorities, and the design of the system all ensured that deprived authorities suffered harsher cuts.

The figures were released in response to the Health Select Committee’s accusations that hospitals are ‘salami slicing’ less headline grabbing services such as physiotherapy for elderly people, in attempts to find £20bn in efficiency savings. See Publicnet

Concerns shared on the nationwide feedback site, which brokers conversations between NHS trusts and patients and their carers, reveal a decline in levels of care across the country with bed shortages and lack of caring staff attributed to NHS spending cuts.

Speaking at the beginning of June 2011, a patient in the North West said: “I came to hospital in February with spinal injuries. The care I received at the beginning was good, but recently care has declined which I feel is due to staff shortages.

Similarly professionals at hospitals are also concerned about the effect that cuts are having on the delivery of service. A healthcare worker at Rotherham hospital, posting anonymously under the username Stressedhealthcarer in July 2011, said: “As a healthcare worker at Rotherham hospital, I am increasingly concerned about the standards of quality care. Due to bed closures patients are being constantly moved throughout their stay which I feel results in disjointed medical and nursing care.

“Senior management aren’t there to explain to disgruntled patients and visitors why their loved one has been moved for the fifth time – it’s left to already stressed and overstretched ward staff!”

Speaking about the impact of efficiency savings on patients’ experiences, CEO of Patient Opinion, Dr Paul Hodgkin, said: “We released these figures to raise greater awareness of the opinions of patients and their carers’ opinion who are being directly affected by the Government’s efficiency drive. “From what they tell us, patients are not opposed to making the NHS more efficient. But it is clear that patients want the NHS to work with their needs when making these cuts, rather than leaving people feeling uncared for and confused.”

The quality of teaching in these ‘non-association’ independent schools tends to be competent but seldom inspiring. The biggest single weakness is the high proportion of schools which do not have sufficiently robust arrangements for safeguarding pupils’ welfare, health and safety.

The proposals build on the current arrangements for inspection. Ofsted will continue to use a four point scale to make qualitative judgements. Detailed grade descriptors will seek to provide more consistency, openness and transparency and encourage independent schools to strive further for improvements to the quality of provision.

Ofsted currently gives independent schools two days’ notice of their education inspection but for inspection of care in boarding and residential special schools no notice is given. Ofsted intends to adopt a similar system for the education inspection of independent schools. Pupils, parents and carers have told Ofsted that inspection without notice is important as it lets the inspectors see the school as it really is.

The views of the pupils themselves, as well as parents, carers, staff and local authorities who use the services of independent schools are highly valued by inspectors who follow up the issues they raise. These views will continue to be an important feature of inspection.

Among independent children’s homes which are registered education providers there is a comparatively lower proportion that makes good or outstanding educational provision. The new framework will focus on the educational progress and achievements of looked after children and look critically at what schools are doing to close the gap between their achievements and other pupils.