Public Service Agreement
Ground breaking new approach with joint work with NHS partners
to promote independence for older people, Performance Indicators
are reduction in admissions to care and reduction in delayed
transfers of care from hospital. Empowering older people through
Active Care so that they can continue to live within their own
communities. Rehabilitation and prevention are the key themes.
Care management re-engineering
Care management redesigned to give professional staff the time
and space to do proper assessments, to empower users and carers.
Other tasks now carried out by support staff, and work in hand to
enable users to directly access some services, e.g. day care, and
for other staff to carry out assessments for Kent County
Council.
Black elders and carers project
Working with Department of Health, looking at access to
services in order to identify barriers, raise culturally competent
practice and new standards of ethnic monitoring. This will enable
Kent County Council to monitor the effectiveness of steps being
taken to ensure access by all the communities in Kent.
Recuperative care and intermediate care
Kent County Council has 40 beds in-house offering recuperative
care which has achieved diversion rate of 80% enabling older people
to return to their own homes, work with Primary Care Trusts has
developed other forms of intermediate care including generic
worker(covering district nurse auxilliary and home help skills),
rapid response and home from hospital schemes working with network
of CARTs (Community assessment and rehabilitation teams) run by NHS
Trusts. Employment schemes for adults with a learning disability A
new team has been set up to develop the excellent progress made in
finding innovative ways of enabling people to enter employment.
This team will co-ordinate the growth of social employment schemes
and social firms.
Direct payments scheme
Direct Payments can be used in arranging
community support or other services that you have been assessed as
needing. Everyone will be offered this option after their
assessment. A Direct Payment is cash that you can be given as an
alternative to arranging services for you. They are about giving
people more freedom, choice, flexibility and control over their
assistance / support.
Adult protection
Kent has implemented "No Secrets" and has a multi-agency
approach to
adult
protection. Training is well established and the impact of the
service has been monitored through a research programme carried out
with the Open University and other Local Authorities.
National Service Framework for Older People
Kent is well placed to respond to the requirement of the NSF as
many of these policies are already in place. The implementation of
the NSF will be challenging but the Public Service Agreement and
other programmes are already driving this
agenda. |