From the 21st September community living Services for people who have a learning disability in Swansea are piloting a locality based night-time response service.
Night-time response workers
This has developed in partnership between City & County of Swansea, Community Lives Consortium and Walsingham Wales.
The idea is simple, we will try to re-model the existing sleepin support that is dispersed across 12 different supported housing schemes in the Gorseinon area and replace them with 2 community based wakeful staff that can arrive at any of these addresses within 15 to 20 minutes.
Why are we doing this?
- We want to create a community based night-time support service that is more responsive to people’s needs where ever they are living in the community, this is a logical extension of the Targeted Support programme we have been exploring to create more responsive and consistent services in the community.
- We need to respond to the working time directive and its implications for sleep-ins. We will no longer be able to provide night time cover in this way without paying the rate as working hours. This would mean eventually changing all sleep-ins to a wakeful shift which would have significant funding implications for the local authority.
- We want to develop a service that is better able to utilise the potential of Assistive Technology for efficiently supporting people in the community.
What would this Social Care Response service look like?
We are delivering a response service that contains:
- Initially half time Response Team Manager
- A team of staff paid to stay awake at a local base paid at wakeful rate. Staff will be available to respond to a number of support needs during the night time.
The initially response staff will respond to calls from;
- Staff and managers currently supporting tenants – These calls will be from a wakeful member of who requires additional staff assistance to provide support. An example would be in the case of when two staff are required to deliver personal care when there are manual handling guidelines in place. Once this support has been provided there is no longer the need to have two people at the service and the response worker returns to the local office.
- Call centres responding to Telecare used by tenants - In this case response workers will be responding to assistive technology alerts. They will receive a phone call from the call centre and will go to the service to respond accordingly. An example may be that a sensor has been triggered when a service user has got out of bed but hasn’t returned to bed after the ‘normal’ amount of time. The response worker will go to the service to check that everything is ok.
How have we set this up?
In order to test this model of service out we have mapped out the community living services and have decided on a geographical area where there is a natural cluster of services.
There has been an assessment of these services to determine what type of support is required at night. These services have been colour coded as Red, Amber and Green.
A red service is a service whereby a member of staff is definitely needed at the service at night. This would need to be a wakeful member of staff in order to comply with the working time rules.
An amber service is a service whereby a response service could be used if certain risks were resolved by, for example, looking at assistive technology.
A green service is a service whereby a response service could be used if the response staff could arrive in a timely manner. E.g. within 15 – 20 minutes.
In putting this in place we are working through 5 implementation phases:
- Phase 1: May to July 2009 – We will be explaining this pilot to staff, relatives and service users. The Response Team Manager will develop the necessary systems and policy framework for the effective running of the service. They will also recruit and train the response workers.
- Phase 2: August 2009 – The Team were in post and receiving training.
- Phase 3: September and October 2009 – All of the green services will use the response service. This will be reviewed.
- Phase 4: November to March 2010 – Technical difficulties will be resolved with the amber services and these may turn into green services.
- Phase 5: March 2010 -A review of the response service will take place before it is rolled out across other geographical areas in Swansea.
It will be interesting to see how this re-modelling of service develops, it is another potential approach to developing more integrated, responsive, locality based models of service.
