From production and management of services to workforce development and community engagement strategy, local authorities and councillors are exploring the potential of digital media for co-production and enhancement of services. The fast pace of technology means greater and more powerful means of collaboration and transformation of services and the workforce.
Social media should be an essential part of new social workers’ toolkits
September 6, 2014
Carers, Depression, disability, internet, Social care
Digital media enables professionals to communicate more effectively with service users and each other
Claudia Megele, senior lecturer, Middlesex University, and head of practice learning, Enfield council
Now is the time to create a combined health and social care system
September 4, 2014
Carers, health, Social care, welfare
4th September 2014
Merging two leaky buckets does not provide a watertight solution.
NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, recently told the Health Select Committee that merging two leaky buckets does not provide a watertight solution. It is for this reason that the growing problems in the NHS and social care cannot be solved by the Better Care Fund or any of the other short-term solutions on offer. Nothing less than a fundamental reform of the funding of health and social care services and citizens’ entitlements to publicly funded support is required to address these problems.
Service users and carers help draw up homecare blueprint
September 2, 2014
Carers, Featured Article, Social care
Practitioners, carers and service users are helping the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence write guidance for improving homecare
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Bridget Warr, chief executive, UK Homecare Association
- Guardian Professional,
Sandra is passionate about good homecare. Her mother had Alzheimer’s and Sandra watched carers come into the home for five years. Sandra knows, as an “expert by experience”, about the big homecare issues: reliability and flexibility of staff, continuity of care and the difficulty of having strangers in the house.
Sandra is a member of a group of people who are helping the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) to produce its first social care guidance, on providing care and support in people’s homes. By highlighting the issues they know about, she and the other carers and service users are keeping them at the forefront of care providers’ minds. It’s a complex thing to get right, but carers and users must be at the heart of improving service provision “inch by inch,” Sandra says.
