1. In adult social care, we support the 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. Our ambition is for people to live independently for as long as possible.
2. Our strategic objectives for Health and Care 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.
3. Specifically for community social care services for adults with mental health conditions, our strategic objectives are:
- Improve the quality of care in Staffordshire, primarily measured by the proportion of registered services we commission rated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) as ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’, and through monitoring how people achieve their individual outcomes and through contract monitoring processes for non-registered services.
- Ensure timely access to care when required, through improving the process / pathway for assessment through to placement.
- Ensure affordability of care, with the Council aiming to pay a fair price, achieving value for money for the Council taxpayers, and remaining within budget.
- Develop and facilitate access to community capacity to help individuals with disabilities remain healthy and independent by encouraging care providers to make the most of people’s strengths and the assets available in local communities including informal support networks, to take positive risks and to avoid restrictive practices.
4. To achieve these outcomes, we will:
- Help people to help themselves by offering good information about how to maintain their mental well-being and where to go for support.
- Minimise medicalisation by strengthening people’s personal resilience and helping them develop lifelong skills for good mental health.
- Build and use community capacity to support people with mental health problems.
- Promote independence by offering support and services to people as close to home as possible and the least restrictive care options.
- Co-produce support and services, working with individuals and communities.
- Encourage and enable our workforce to learn and grow, develop their skills and maintain their own mental well-being.
- Embrace technologies to improve people’s mental well-being, access to services and quality of care.
5. Good mental health is a priority in the Health & Wellbeing Strategy 2022-27. The Strategy promotes the building of strong and resilient communities who can support each other, and individuals who are in control of their own mental well-being.