Next week, Cabinet members will review the findings of our recent Local Government Association (LGA) Peer Review in Adult Social Care.

Last October, we welcomed senior leaders from other councils to Barnsley. Their visit was a great opportunity for us to reflect on what we’re already doing well, how we can build on this and where we can continue improving our support.

Focusing on the key themes of working with people, providing support and leadership, we had excellent feedback from the Peer Review team, who published their final findings in December.

Their feedback highlighted the positive impact our innovative services, strengths-based approach and strong partnerships are having on people’s health and wellbeing.

Key strengths highlighted in the report include:

• How we’re fostering close collaboration with our Barnsley health partners, helping us support timely hospital discharges and enabling people to get the right support, at the right time and in the right place. We’re also working together to develop new approaches, such as our integrated out-of-hours service.
• How our new Initial Response Team is supporting people to get help early, supporting people to live independently, and supporting the important role carers have in people’s lives.
• How we’re working together with Children’s Services to develop our Preparing for Adulthood offer, helping more young people achieve the future they want. This work also shows how we’re delivering service improvements centred on people’s needs.
• The strength of leadership in Adult Social Care, setting our culture and capturing the spirit of Barnsley. This leadership can be seen in the innovative ways we’re supporting people’s wellbeing, such as our Health on the High Street initiative.

Their visit was an extensive look into the support we offer. The team spoke to over 100 people, spanning our teams, our partners and local people with lived experience of Adult Social Care.

Alongside our Peer Review, we invited Healthwatch Barnsley to run a mystery shopping exercise, helping us better understand people’s experiences when getting in touch with our teams. We’re delighted to report that Healthwatch rated Adult Social Care at Barnsley Council as good.

Both our Peer Review and recent mystery shopping exercise are helping us to better understand how we can continue improving the support we offer.

As part of next week’s report, Cabinet members will also be asked to consider our plans for responding to and learning from this feedback. This includes how we make better use of data within Adult Social Care and how we continue strategically delivering commissioning.

Councillor Jo Newing,  Cabinet Spokesperson for Place Health and Adult Social Care, said: “In Adult Social Care, we’re committed to continually improving the way we work to offer the best support for our communities, putting our residents at the heart of everything we do.

“From the strengths-based approach of our social work teams to our Better Lives programme, we’re incredibly proud of the hard work, resilience and creativity our teams show day in, day out. It is fantastic to see all their hard work recognised in the excellent feedback from our recent LGA Peer Review, helping us to showcase how we’re doing things differently for our communities.

“I want to thank our teams, our partners and the Barnsley residents who took part in our Peer Review, offering their honest, constructive feedback on the support we offer. We will make sure that we take time to learn from these findings and make positive changes for our residents.”

You can read more about our Adult Social Care Peer Review in our Cabinet report.

Welcoming LGA Peer Reviewers to Barnsley is one of the many ways we’re preparing for our upcoming Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection. For more information about the CQC’s plans to assess local councils across the country, please visit their website.

We would also love to hear about your experience of our Adult Social Care services, helping us to improve our support. You can share your feedback with us by filling out our online form.