Issue - meetings

(a)       That the report be noted;

(b)       That the comments/observations of the Committee are fed back to the Corporate Resources Overview & Scrutiny Committee who are responsible for the overview and monitoring of performance, in particular the concerns around the ‘red’ risk areas which also relate to Health; and

(c)       That the comments on graph formatting and embedded documents be passed to the Performance team for future reference.

The Senior Manager: Commissioning and Performance presented the 2014/15 year end service performance report produced by the Chief Officer (Social Services) for his portfolio. He gave a short presentation on performance, outlining work which had been undertaken to improve performance and areas where improvement was needed, as outlined within the report.

During explanation on the two operational risks identified in the wider risk register on the resilience of the independent sector, reference was made to the lack of available beds in the county, the increasing demand to support individuals with more complex needs and work to progress more extra care facilities as an alternative to residential care.  As mentioned in the previous item, the challenges around recruiting quality nursing staff had resulted in heavy reliance on bank (agency) nurses and would be the subject of discussions with the health sector.  Information was also provided on measures to improve sickness absence figures.

The Housing Regeneration & Strategy Manager explained that timescales for Disabled Facilities Grants had been greatly affected by staff recruitment and retention issues in Housing over the past 12 months.  However, it was hoped that this would be resolved through the restructuring of teams.

On the review of care plans during the year, the Senior Manager: Commissioning and Performance pointed out that the Council’s achievement of 98% in the previous year had been the best performance across Wales, and was pleased to note that this level had been sustained for 2014/15.

The Senior Manager Safeguarding: Lead Children reported that all year end performance indicators for Children’s Services had improved, apart from two relating to the completion of initial assessments where there was evidence of the child being seen/being seen alone by a social worker and re-referrals rates.  She explained that the re-referrals rates were not straightforward as systems could capture multiple referrals relating to a single event and incorrectly reflect these as re-referrals, eg  referrals from multiple agencies attending a single event would appear as re-referrals.  Work has already commenced to review re-referrals and to revisit recording and reporting processes to provide a true reflection of re-referral rates.  As an update, she reported that of the 35 indicators for last year, 20 had shown improvement, seven remained the same and eight decreased.

On corporate reporting (Section 3), Councillor McGuill pointed out the need for percentage bands on the graphs between Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 to be consistent to enable proper comparison.  The Senior Manager: Commissioning and Performance said that this would be relayed to corporate colleagues who were responsible for producing the information.

Councillor Veronica Gay requested that the embedded document in Section 3 of the report be made available, if possible, and that any such documents be made accessible in future reports.

RESOLVED:

(a)       That the report be noted;

(b)       That the comments/observations of the Committee are fed back to the Corporate Resources Overview & Scrutiny Committee who are responsible for the overview and monitoring of performance, in particular the concerns around the ‘red’ risk areas which also  ...  view the full minutes text for item 15