Welcome
In this issue we bring you details of the Total Place approach to providing public services, and how it affects adult social care.
More than ever councils are seeking to find creative solutions to meet the challenge of ensuring satisfaction with local services, while at the same time fulfilling government demands for efficiency savings.
Total Place was a high profile attempt at addressing this issue. The aim was to look at spending as a whole, across organisations, to identify where money is spent unnecessarily due to duplication and bureaucracy, and to maximise the impact by sharing funds and resources.
The approach was tested in a year-long pilot study involving 13 areas - three localities in the West Midlands, namely Birmingham, Worcestershire and a sub-region of Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire. Results show great potential for local authorities to reduce costs and improve outcomes for local people. Their focus ranged from intensive family intervention to gang crime, from frequent hospital users to high need neighbourhoods.
Recently the coalition government announced its plans for taking Total Place forward by setting up new Community Budgets: the first set will go live in April next year.
The idea is for councils and their partners to put various strands of funding into one pot from which money will be allocated to spend on priorities mutually agreed by the organisations involved.
As with Total Place, Community Budgets will operate on the premise of breaking down barriers that prevent collaborative working across and between organisations, as well as improving results for local people while reducing costs.
Greater emphasis is placed on making services more people centred – something we are familiar with in adult social care.
Community Budgets, along with moves to transfer responsibility for public health back to local authorities as outlined in the government’s Public Health White Paper, mean social care and the health services will be increasingly required to adopt a joined up approach to providing services.
Andy Hancox
Director
Improvement and Efficiency
West Midlands
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