Joint Working in health and social care service improvement

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 11:08

for service users
Care can come from many directions - medical care (health), personal care (usually social care also charities), and a whole lot of areas where the distinction isn't so clear. To the recipient of services, it doesn't matter - and nobody likes to have unnecessary visits by multiple people because of the politics of the situation.
From the staff perspective
Caring professionals may express their care in different ways at different points in their career. Staff move between health and social care employers, sometimes simply because responsibility for providing the service, and therefore the money to pay the wages, moves.
Consultancy addressing these issues
One of the greatest missed opportunities in the caring services has been the need to plan workforce around patient pathways. Some regions have good links between workforce planning in NHS, and with local authority social care groups. Others don't.

Champions of the Future Workforce was a national group hosted by Skills for Health to bring togetehr representatives from each region, to learn from each other and spread best practice.
Service providers often focus on delivery for users, and in a caring industry may find it difficult to understand why the commissioners (especially of mandatory services) dont seem to share their enthusiasm. At the same time commissioners are wary of the promises given, with neither evidence nor a monitoring regime. Commissioning Innovation is a series of coaching workshops to address this issue, getting providers off development grants and to sustainable funding and contracts for services. We also developed a one-day workshop to explore the issues locally which might be of interest.
Social enterprises have been used as a legal structure for formerly public sector provided services. Having set up a social enterprise providing community care using NHS staff, I believe this is a workable model. I'm currently establishing a GP Provider Consortium which has different merits in a different context

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If I were running the country - encouraging business

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 05/21/2013 - 09:33

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Minimum wage

Fantasy government - what would I do if I were in government?  Well how about reduce corporation tax, increase income tax, increase minimum wage and invest in job creation in the regions?  That would be a good start - create jobs where there are workers, then make sure that the right amount of tax is collected and at the same time reduce spend on benefits which are only used to increase profits of selfish organisations.

Would it work?  Have your say.

PwC Report on the Current State of Project Management

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 05/17/2013 - 10:44

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PwC Project Management ReportPwC found that successful companies are getting more mature in their project management ability.  This raises the game – successful companies have lower costs from fewer failed projects, and less successful companies have to work harder to catch up.  There are some important lessons to take this report for everyone – Read more…

Joy instead of tedium

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 21:04

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The Office

Every office has them - the tasks that have to be done that nobody likes doing.  Whether it's the audit, the wages, standard letters, whatever it is - someone has to do it and it feels like a waste of time and money.

Why should you care?

So you employ somebody, so why do you care about how tedious the task is? Well they are costing money, to do something that could be done far more effectively.

Learning from the Past

Submitted by HugoM on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 20:27

Evidence for service improvement

Many public service changes have little basis in evidence. Their success (or otherwise) does not appear to depend on how 'good' the policy itself is, but rather on how it has been implemented. This relies on staff attitudes and relationships. My research falls into a number of broad categories: finding out what is currently happening; what people think about it; and what people think it will mean.

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Consumer Price Index (CPI) Calculator for SROI

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Tue, 04/16/2013 - 10:05

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CPI components

When calculating a Social Return on Investment (SROI) evaluation or SROI forecast , sometimes you have to rely on published figures from reports.  But if these are from a few years ago, then they probably need adjusting for inflation.

There are calculators on the web to do this for you, but I found them cumbersome and it was difficult to keep a record of what calculator I'd used, and how, for which value - auditability and transparency is vital for SROI.  So here's a spreadsheet to do this properly!