Overarching Activities
Co-production and Working in Partnership
We are committed to realising the service’s vision for coproduction and involvement. Through a staff survey it was fed back the service should focus more on involving people with lived experience and be more proactive and inclusive in engaging these groups, understanding their experiences, and working with them to improve services.
Therefore, underpinning our improvement programme and part of our governance is a new Design Panel, made up of customers, carers, staff and other stakeholders. The Design Panel has been part of developing principles for our improvement journey over the next two years and will be involved in the changes we make to services. This will be one of the cornerstones of the programme of improvement, as we will be involving people before we make changes.
The VCSE Collaboration Board, chaired by a member of the VCSE, has been in place since 2022 and is attended by the Director of Adult Services and other senior staff. The board has supported the establishment of a new co-production Practitioner Group comprising staff and stakeholders, and a senior leader customer and carer engagement forum established in . These groups have been able to shape improvement projects over the past two years, meaning we have customer and carer voices in the development of improvement work. Also in place is our county-wide stakeholder network, involving VCSE organisations, the NHS, district, borough and parish councils and other partners with whom we engage and exchange information.
Managing our Budget
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
As a service we ensure that we deliver the County Council’s Equality and Inclusion policy statement which sets out the Council’s commitment to deliver fair and inclusive services for all West Sussex communities. Decisions taken include an assessment of any equality implications of proposals and how, if necessary, these will be mitigated for people with characteristics whose interests are protected by law. Our long-standing Customer and Carer Group, Minorities Health and Social Care Group and Learning Disability and Autism Partnership Boards meet regularly and serve as critical friends to the service.
Spotlight: Co-Production
Adult social care staff and customers held a Directly Provided Services Co-Production event last year in support of people and organisations working together to share influence, skills, and experience to design, deliver and monitor care services and projects.
This event provided an opportunity to showcase and celebrate many of the social care co -production projects during 2022, as well as facilitate networking and future planning, including the newly designed co-production toolkit for staff to utilize.
Information about the event has been shared widely throughout the council, encouraging all staff to utilise the co-production toolkit to help them to think through what co-production would mean for their work. This is a live document which will be amended as we do and learn more.
We continue to work towards embedding a co -production approach across more of our activities, a recent example being the development of a set of design principles for our improvement programme.
In 2022, we co-designed our financial assessment customer information booklets with members of the Customer and Carer Group and our VCSE colleagues. This comprised informal interviews, workshop sessions and meeting discussions.