New Types of Worker - Delivering Choice and Independence in Adult Social Care: Strand 2 - Brokerage
Delivering Choice and Independence in Adult Social Care
Strand 2 - Brokerage to support self directed services.
Context/Background
Drawing on the Social Care Green Paper Independence, Well-being and Choice (Department of Health, 2005) and the White Paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say (HM Government/ Department of Health, 2006) the London Borough of Barnet acknowledged the need for people to have greater choice and control in developing the borough's strategy for Adult Social Services.
As part of this strategy, Barnet Adult Social Services commissioned two brokerage projects:
- Managed by Barnet Mencap – Brokers for Change - to enable ten people with learning disabilities and their families to direct their own care using individualised budgets.
- Managed within Barnet Adult Social Services – Brokers to work with service users to support them to plan and purchase their own support using individualised budgets allocated via the care manager's assessment.
Aims and Objectives of the projects
- To investigate the implications for a local authority of fostering brokerage skills to staff who would then help service users to commission and direct their own care.
- To address the question 'What is the role of the broker and what are their training needs?'
- To analyse the training provided by the two projects.
- To review the core skills required by brokers.
- To identify other learning and development methods which would help brokers to support service users in their new role of directing their own care.
The Plan
The Barnet Mencap project planned to use a lead broker who had been trained using the 'In Control' model [In Conrol, 2008) to train 5 further Barnet Mencap staff. The aim of the training was to increase participants' understanding of the ethos of personalised services, and how to make the most of funding opportunities and developing community resources, for the benefit of service users.
In the internal project, existing staff would be interviewed and appointed, and given tailored training programmes to address skills and knowledge gaps.
What Happened / was Achieved
The Mencap brokers were trained and given monthly support sessions.
Barnet Mencap linked the brokers with service users they would be working with and, on average, the Mencap brokers spent 10.5 hours support planning for each service user.
The internal Barnet Adult Social Services project gave training to 7 existing staff. The initial training included Fair Access to Care Services, outcome based assessment and self-directed care, negotiation skills, person centred planning, contractual issues, community networking and mapping, commissioning and purchasing. The trained staff provided service users with information to diversify service provision, and collated information on a pool of services which were to be publicised via a webpage.
For more details of each project see Case Study: Training Programmes for Brokerage Projects – London Borough of Barnet.
What was Achieved
Much workforce learning has been collated from the projects and can be found in the Case Study.
What Helped and What Hindered
See Case Study: Training Programmes for Brokerage Projects – London Borough of Barnet. under heading - What worked well and what constrained the work?
What We Found Out
The Case Study has details of the findings.
For skills needed by brokers, see below.
Amongst other issues, the internal evaluation concluded that the core training for different types of broker should be the same but that some specialist training would be required for each different brokerage role.
Evaluation
The internal evaluation of the two models included both qualitative and quanitative data obtained via interviews and questonnaires.
What New or Changed Skills do People Need to Work in This Way?
The evaluation of the two brokerage projects identified the following areas of core skills and knowledge for brokers:
- an awareness of the ethos of personalisation
- being able to negotiate at different levels; advocacy skills; dealing with conflict within families
- contracting and commissioning skills
- knowledge and understanding of cultural diversity and the values and beliefs of service users;
- empathy, active listening skills and appropriate questioning skills
- skills in mapping community resources; analysing market information; providing feedback on contractual issues; and issues of standards of service.
The Future
The broker's role is felt to be crucial in taking forward the personalisation agenda and supporting service users to make use of individual budgets to meet their needs.
Contact details
Shelly Gibbons, Barnet Mencap Shelly.Gibbons@barnetmencap.org.uk
Chandana Sanyal, London Borough of Barnet
chandana.sanyal@barnet.gov.uk
Date 18.8.09
