Making it Real in Staffordshire - a case study

There are now 688 organisations signed-up to Making it Real. TLAP are continuously working to secure further registrations and to help organisations engage with the Making it Real markers and manage their progress towards delivering personalised care and support. We asked Staffordshire County Council to give us an insight into how they chose their priorities and the challenges they think they may encounter in going forward.

Was it difficult to limit your priorities to three?

Selecting the three key priorities was quite straightforward, and each is aligned strongly with Staffordshire's vision of a connected population, where everyone has the opportunity to prosper, be healthy and happy.

However we waited until three months after the implementation of our action plan, which gave us time to reflect on progress against the fifteen actions which had been set against the three most 'under performing' themes taken from our first Making it Real consultation in spring 2013.

At this point, we selected a key action from each of the original themes, and these became our Making it Real priorities.

What kind of challenges were you facing which led to choosing these priorities?

In line with Staffordshire's vision for residents to be healthier and more independent, we identified a need to improve practice quality and to further embed the ethos of personalised support planning across the adult social care workforce. Although people who use services and carers are increasingly using direct payments to purchase their care and support, evidence gathered through a case file audit and a consultation suggested that people need to be further enabled to have more choice and control through use of person-centred approaches to achieve independence and to meet their goals.

As the number of people using direct payments increases, there is a growing need to raise awareness with the public about the process of employing a PA. Currently, Staffordshire's CareMatch PA Register is under-utilised, with just 103 of 962 registered PAs employed. In order to increase the match between people with a direct payment and the registered PAs, various support mechanisms have been put in place to increase these figures.

In line with our vision toensure that people feel safer, happier and more supported in and by their communities, we have set up a project to build relationships between individuals, organisations and the public sector to progress collective activities through use of existing assets. This is essentially an Asset-Based Community Development (ABDCD) approach which will enable them to access the information they need from their own communities, thus reducing dependence on traditional services.

Do you anticipate meeting obstacles as you work through your Making it Real programme?

We anticipate 'mainstreaming' to be the biggest potential concern in the continued implementation of Making it Real in Staffordshire. Not only is this due to the sheer size of the local authority, but because of the difficulty in convincing both the public and our partner organisations of the authenticity of the promises we make in our action plans. We received a number of comments from residents during phase one of the consultation about the depth of our commitment to the project, while other professionals raised concerns about there being simply too many initiatives across the various organisations.

Going forward, we would welcome fresh input from Think Local Act Personal around ways in which they might be able to provide additional support to organisations which are committed to delivering on these action plans.