Community Lives Consortium

Targeted Support Pilot

In November 2005 the Management Committee approved a proposal to try out a different way of providing support to people who live in the Neath area. We had approval to try out the following:

• To bring staff and technology together to support people to become as independent as possible.
• To measure how independent people were before the pilot started and then measure throughout the pilot.
• To split the Support Worker role into two roles that of a Support Coordinator and a Support Worker. The Support Coordinator will work with a few Service Users and the Support Workers will be more mobile and work with different Service Users.

To try the pilot out between July 2006 and March 2007. If the pilot works well we will aim to roll out the pilot across the whole agency. Network Network 6 was chosen for the pilot. Within this network there are 20 Service Users/Tenants living in 11 different locations. We provided 1500 hours of support each week to these people. We agreed the pilot would be a success if the following happened:

• The people we support become more independent and safe within their home
• The staff had better jobs and terms and conditions
• The services cost less per person to the Local Authority

We have a general action plan for implementing targeting support which is as follows:

• Hold orientation and consultation sessions with the staff and managers in the network
• Gathering base-line evaluation information on service users
• Consult with individual Care Managers to review existing care packages and support hours
• Consultation with service users and their relatives
• Install agreed Assisted technology packages
• Establish an local office base
• Introduce rota management software
• Recruitment to support co-ordinator posts (temp)
• Staff induction to targeting support
• Implementation
• Ongoing evaluation and review, including collection of post implementation data