Social work and related services

Tender description

Flintshire County Council is seeking to redevelop its disability community services (Including learning disability, physical disability and sensory impairment services) and has been working with local providers and people with disabilities through a process of coproduction to create a shared vision for disability services in the future. The Council is now seeking innovative partners to work with us to progress a new single preventative model across disability services. The aim of this model is to ensure an outcome based approach is applied across community services for people with physical disabilities, learning disabilities and sensory impairment. The lead organisation will further be responsible for developing and maintaining professional relationships through informal partnership working with the other contracted organisations and/or spot purchased providers. This will include chairing and overseeing arrangements for a formal strategy group where by all organisations within the informal partnership will come together on a frequent basis to collaborate, innovate and share information, as well as discuss and report on service areas. This Group must be supported and involve a citizen perspective, including involving citizens in all key decisions regarding the service enabling them to have fair and meaningful input in co-designing service action plans. All organisations within the informal partnership will be required to meet the core outcomes of this single model and fully engage in all activities which are implicit to the aims of the overall service specification and informal partnership. The core areas of service have been established through a process of coproduction with adults and children and experts in the field, together it has been firmly established that the focus of this single model should be to provide accessible, inclusive disability services that work to support adults and children in reaching their full potential and prevent adults and children from requiring substantial statutory support. The lead organisation will have enough flexibility to work with informal partnership providers to develop appropriate solutions to the problem that needs to be addressed. What is the vision for this service? When talking to people in Flintshire the issue around access to transport has been presented on a number of occasions. The vision for this service is that it will provide information and advice regarding local transport, specialist training and guidance sessions on how to use transport safely and the service will also develop transport buddy and car share schemes. Who is this service for? The service will focus on those people (adults and children) with disabilities who do not meet the threshold of requiring formal support plans from social care services and will instead reach people at the earliest opportunity, providing services to prevent their needs escalating. This service will champion voluntary and community action at a neighbourhood level, supporting local people to take control of any issues, interests and needs in their area and fostering community spirit. Aims and objectives of the service. 1) Increased opportunity to participate in social and leisure activities, and generally broadened horizons; 2) Greater freedom, choice and control; 3) Improvement to general health and well-being, improved quality of life; 4) Reduced likelihood of developing anxiety or worry regarding lone travel; 5) Increased opportunity to access healthcare services; and 6) Increased opportunity and likelihood of entering employment or education; 7) The main benefit to parents and carers is a reduction in care responsibilities, enabling greater participation in employment, education and leisure activities; 8) Opportunity to learn a skill; 9) Possibility for people with physical disabilities or learning difficulties to become trainers or buddies; 10) A chance to engage with the community. What is the vision for this service? Flintshire Council is in the process of realigning its model of social care to increase its focus on prevention and community based support. The council will support the voluntary and community sector to deliver a preventative community development programme. Working with individuals and organisations, the programme will realise the potential within communities to encourage and enable disabled people to stay independent for longer. The service will be expected to connect people with disabilities to existing services and work with the voluntary and community sectors to develop new initiatives to meet the identified needs in Flintshire communities. This vision for the service is that it will support the growth of active and sustainable communities in which people with disabilities are valued and can play their full part. The service will provide advice, resources and practical training to support disabled people in Flintshire and their communities in establishing or sustaining projects, groups and initiatives that they feel are important and can be sustained locally. The service will go out and actively engage people (outreach working) talking to people with disabilities and working with them to recognise and harness their strengths, resources and skills to develop initiatives in their local communities, offering access to technical expertise and support to start up projects and let the communities continue to support them to grow. The service will have a social media component where wanted helping people to develop their own social media resources, such as forums and groups and will also line to the National Dewis Portal. The service will also provide people with advice and guidance around available avenues of funding and/or fundraising. Who is this service for? The service will focus on those people (adults and children) with disabilities who do not meet the threshold of requiring formal support plans from social care services and will instead reach people at the earliest opportunity, providing services to prevent their needs escalating. What is the vision for this service? During our coproduction work people told us that equipment and technology is one of the most important priorities for adults and children with disabilities. However adults, children and providers consistently informed us that adults and children are often unsure about what is available, or what can help them. We found many adults and children ask provider’s questions like; how do you know what is available? Where do you go to buy it? How do you know what is right for you? How do you know if a supplier is reputable? National research also reflects what we have found and indicates that many people lack the means to access online resources or the skills to navigate them. Whilst we are aware that this problem is likely to decline as the younger generations of today are accustomed to using digital services, it still presents as an immediate challenge. This service will help with these issues and will provide adults and children with physical disabilities, learning disabilities and sensory impairments in Flintshire with impartial, up to date and user friendly advice, information and training on equipment and technology. It is important the service offers advice and guidance for adults and children on what equipment and technology could help them and where they can purchase it, whether online or in local stores. The service will also provide good quality product reviews, user guides, best value resources and links to supplier directories and factsheets. The service will not be commissioned by Flintshire Council to sell products or advertise on behalf of providers and will provide services online and face to face working with communities. The ethos of this service is not about doing for but instead about giving the adults and children the skills to enable them to use local and online resources to shop and research new and developing equipment and technology. The core aim of the service is to keep adults and children as independent as possible for as long as possible and with this in mind it is essential the service is able to identify if a person requires additional support to enable them to access information and advice or to use relevant equipment or technology successfully. Where adults and children are unable to do so the service will hold community training workshops and invite adults and children who require extra support for training or alternatively the service will recognise the need for specialist provision and refer on to other providers or social services and health bodies etc. The new service will be required to develop links with specialist services which will enable practitioners and other health and social care professionals to use this service as a resource encouraging adults and children to access the new service directly including the self-funder or direct payment market or with some support. A key aim of the new service is to help adults and children to make changes which will improve their well-being that will prevent the need for more costly interventions, such as admission to hospital or residential care etc. What is the vision for this service? The vision for this service is to rehabilitate/habilitate and re-able adults and children with sensory loss to enhance the quality of life, promote the continuing independence and raise awareness of sensory loss in our communities. The service will centre around re-ablement, which is about enabling people to do things for themselves (in contrast to the traditional service models) to maximise their ability to live life as independently as possible and Rehabilitation/Habilitation which is central in enabling children and adults with a sensory loss to live as independently as possible and develop skills that otherwise would have been learnt incidentally, this is vital where an individual has lost or been unable or delayed in developing those skills as a result of their sensory loss. The overall intention of the service is to restore and enable a person to achieve skills and abilities they may have previously had or wish to develop in order to gain maximum independence. It is an outcome-focused, personalised approach where the person using the service sets their own goals and is supported by a rehabilitation/habilitation worker to achieve them over a dedicated time period (based on need). It supports a person’s physical, sensory, social and emotional needs and aims to reduce or minimise the need for ongoing support after the support is completed. This service seeks to improve the skills and resilience of an individual in their specific situation. For this service to be effective, it is essential the support provided should be co-produced between the adult or child and the skilled practitioners (rehabilitation/habilitation officers). Together they should determine through assessment the potential of the individual and the barriers to improvement to draw up a programme to achieve that child or adult’s outcomes. Effective reablement and rehabilitation/habilitation should be delivered in partnership between the local authority and the NHS and it is essential that this service establishes collaborative working relationships with health and social care sectors. Bidding for all lots 1 to 5.