Health and social work services

Tender description

This notice is intended to provide interested suppliers with the opportunity to gain an understanding of a potential Department of Health (DH) requirement. The attached documents are therefore draft and for Information only, may change and may not fully reflect any eventual final versions. The Department of Health will ultimately seek tenders for the provision of a service to work nationally with a range of local areas as pilot sites to design and test an effective operating model for named social workers for people with learning disabilities or autism who may have mental health conditions. This will require Local Areas, with support from the successful organisation to innovate and test in practice key elements including the role, intended recipients, required support, processes, outputs and outcomes. Co-ordinating and sharing learning as the pilot's progress will be fundamental to the success of the programme and informing future decisions on wider rollout. Therefore, the successful organisation will be able to provide evidence of previous experience in building momentum and wider interest in new ways of working and building a live and ongoing platform for a community of best practice. The successful organisation will support, help shape, and co-ordinate across areas in order to enable robust local evaluation and establish outcome measures to allow ongoing comparison and later summative evaluation of the programme. There will be available funding to release trained social workers in each local area to undertake the named social worker role with appropriate support, measurement and recording of results and experience. It is intended that the majority of the funding available is used to release social workers to undertake this role and the successful organisation will be required to support the Department of Health in identifying and allocating individual payment to the Local Area Pilots. Deliverables shall include: 1) a Baseline Report to be provided to the Department of Health no later than 3 weeks after the start of the contract that: — Describes the current situation of the identified local areas that will undertake the pilot activities. — Proposes a timetable and action list for each local area pilot to turn the Local Area Pilot Intended Outcomes into operational delivery. — Identifies the key baseline areas for comparison that may allow consistent measurement of pilot scheme efficacy. 2) a Mid-Term report that details progress on the overall Local Area Pilot scheme, delivered not later than 4 months after the start of the requirement that details the processes to be used in seeking to deliver the intended outcomes. To include; — An outline of the Named Social Worker Pilots for each local area and reflect the needs of each local area and their communities. — Demonstration of how the pilots align with Transforming Care models being developed in local areas and what the added value is. — Proposes a timetable and project plan for each pilot site highlighting commonalities for implementation of the ‘My Social Worker’ prototype. 3) Provision of all retained data to allow subsequent analysis and comparison. The data should be capable of being shared across the NHS community in order to provide a transparent means in which other areas can learn from this experience. 4) A final pilot report to be provided to the Department of Health that details the data collected; summarises findings and highlights the aspects of the pilot findings that will impact potential future implementation. The Government ran a public consultation ‘No voice unheard, no right ignored’ between March and May 2015 which sought views on strengthening the rights of people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health conditions to enable them to live more independently. Many of the issues raised were about the fundamentals of how to treat people, how to involve them, and how to enable people to challenge decisions in the system. Responses to the consultation provided a consensus that, as well as people being able to challenge decisions, there was a need for greater professional challenge to support them. This needed to be independent and professionally-based so that challenge could be made across the health and care system. In November 2015, informed by responses to the consultation, the Government set out a phased series of actions to achieve a significant change in the experience of care and in outcomes for people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health conditions by 2020, including to: ‘pilot access to a named social worker who will provide professional advice and support, be the primary point of contact for the service user and their family/ carers wherever the person is being supported, and provide a professional voice across the system’. A supplier engagement day will be held with interested organisations, details of how to attend the day are provided in section I.I.8 below. This notice is intended to provide interested suppliers with the opportunity to gain an understanding of a potential Department of Health (DH) requirement. The attached documents are therefore draft and for Information only, may change and may not fully reflect any eventual final versions. The Department of Health ultimately intends to seek tenders for the provision of a service to work with a range of local areas as pilot sites to design and trial an effective operating model for Supported Self-Assessment and Planning Pilots. The project will monitor and co-ordinate a Supported Self-Assessment and Planning Pilot in up to 9 local authorities across England. The service shall provide: — The programme management of the Pilot, and the provision of professional advice where any practical issues arise on a Pilot site; — Project support within each individual local authority involved in the Pilot to ensure they have enough resource to establish and run the Pilot effectively. > The Care Act 2014 set out in legislation the key requirements for how local authorities must carry out needs and carers assessments. This allows the assessor to use their professional judgement to decide how detailed the assessment needs to be depending on the person's needs. > The Act also allows local authorities to carry out a supported self-assessment. This is where the local authority and the person with care needs carry out the assessment jointly. For a supported self-assessment the person carries out the assessment themselves and the assessor assures that it is an accurate reflection of the person's needs. The Supported Self-Assessment and Planning Pilots will therefore look at different models to how it can be carried out, and how this personalised approach to assessment informs the care planning process. The learnings from the Pilots will be shared with all authorities so they can use the learnings to inform their own approaches to supported self-assessment. > A supplier engagement day will be held with interested organisations, details of how to attend the day are provided in section I.I.8 below.