Our vision and objectives

In adult social care, we support the County Council’s vision of being an ambitious, innovative and sustainable county, where everyone has the opportunity to prosper, be healthy and happy – including people with adult social care needs. In particular, we support the Council’s priority outcome that everyone in Staffordshire will be healthier and independent for longer, with a priority to encourage good health and wellbeing, resilience and independence. These outcomes and priorities increasingly shape our approach to strength-based working, integration, prevention and community services.

For the care in the home and supported living sector, the more successful we are in achieving these outcomes and priorities, the fewer people (as a percentage of the whole population) will enter long term care. Therefore,the quality of their care and their eventual outcomes will remain hugely important. The average complexity and extent of care needs of people who require care in the home will continue to increase over time, and this will continue to have implications for the physical environment, skills within the care teams, and links with primary, community care and other services.These will all continue to grow in importance over the coming years..

Our strategic objectives for the whole of the council’s Health and Care Directorate are to:

• Promote good health and independence, and encourage and enable people to take personal responsibility for maintaining their well-being

• Ensure effective and efficient assessment of needs that offers fair access to services

• Maintain a market for care and support that offers services at an affordable price

• Ensure best use of resources, people, data and technology

Specifically for commissioning care in the home, our strategic objectives are:

• Ensuring timely access to care in the home when required – including in response to rapid changes in their care needs, or following a hospital discharge

• Improving access to step-up reablement services and developing a stronger reablement ethos across our community-based services

• Developing models of home care and commissioning processes that are outcomes-focused and more able to respond to fluctuating needs, building on the role of care providers as trusted assessors