Agenda item

Children's Workforce Health Check 2020

[Courtney Abbott, Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner for Children and Adults, to lead presentation]

 

Minutes:

Courtney Abbott, Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner, introduced the report and presentation on the findings of the Children’s Social Work Workforce Health Check for 2020. The panel were invited to comment on proposed actions to improve the health of the social work workforce.

 

The Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner advised the panel that the presentation is similar in content to the previous Social Work report.

There is no requirement to do an annual survey, but it was agreed last year to include the views of the general workforce as it was considered to be important. The survey uses similar questions to that used with social workers. In total 119 survey responses were received.

 

The Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner gave details of main findings from the survey.

 

The panel were invited to comment on the findings. The panel discussed concerns highlighted in the survey about workload issues and how social work workforce was managing. The Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner commented on the expectation that with training and the use of Eclipse and other tools will reduce admin workloads.

 

The panel queried the reasons for the low response to the survey. The Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner responded that a possible reason for the low response rate could be linked to survey fatigue, as there were a number of other surveys being done at the time.

 

The start of the survey also coincided with start of the second lockdown. The findings from the survey will be discussed the workforce and during the visits questions about how to get better engagement to encourage more people to complete the survey form.

 

The panel queried the work being done to respond to the issues of where people have commented on the workload management issues. The Quality and Improvement Advanced Practitioner commented on the importance of the current monthly supervision meetings with an employee’s line manager to raise any concerns about case workload issues. The panel queried if workload issues would create a situation where a worker was unable to take annual leave. 

 

The Andrew Wolverson, Head of Children’s Strategy and Partnerships responded that the Council’s position is that managers should be as flexible as possible, to allow people to take leave as booked, whilst acknowledging that social work is not 9-5 job and there may be occasions when leave granting booked leave may not be possible.

 

Andrew Wolverson, Head of Children’s Strategy and Partnerships was confident that everybody was able to take their leave entitlement during the year, while accepting that in certain situations it was not possible to take leave as booked.  The service will continue to work with managers to ensure the wellbeing of employees.

The Director of Children’s and Adults Services supported the comments and detailed the extra support such as counselling which has been offered in the past where there has been a particularly complex or upsetting incident involving the death of a child. In this situation the Council has commissioned or offered to commission or procured specific counselling support services.

 

The Director of Children’s and Adults Services commented on the range of welfare support available as part of the overall employee wellbeing offer.

 

The panel welcomed the report and thanked the presenter.

 

Resolved:

1.    The panel agreed to note the findings of the Children’s Services Social Workforce Health Check for 2020.

 

2.    The panel agreed to endorse the proposed actions to improve the health of the social care workforce.

 

3.    The panel comments on the findings to be considered in future reports.

 


 

Supporting documents: