Co-production and engagement
In Adult Social Care, we place adults and their carers at the heart of everything we do. We are committed to ensuring that people with care and support needs and their carers can be equal partners in planning and shaping future developments in Adult Social Care. But we know we’ve got some way to go with this.
Behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard to try and develop our own approach to co-production and ensuring that we are involving people with care and support needs and carers in the development of services, something as simple as ensuring we get feedback along people’s journeys, to being part of recruitment decisions to helping shape and create new services. That is why we’ve developed the ‘Engagement, Involvement and Co-Production Our Approach – 2022’ a document which outlines our key commitments to making this happen. We want to ensure that the involvement of people with care and support needs and carers becomes standard practice.
Peter recruits his own support staff
What did we do?
For the last 4 years, we have tried to improve the involvement of Promoting Independent Living Service (PILS) tenants in the recruitment of their own staff.
The Promoting Independent Service offers support to people in their own tenancies around the clock to live as independently as possible, to be active in their local community and to live the lifestyle that they choose to live.
Some people live in their own house, others live in shared accommodations with friends. Peter lives in his own flat, within a small number of flats, with staff on hand 24/7.
What could be more powerful than people choosing those that are going to be supporting them in the future?
We provide training with tenants to ensure they understand the recruitment process and how to identify the right attributes in their future staff. We use a card system made up of staff pictures with a description of them on the back. This is designed to ensure people are not choosing a friendly-looking face or rejecting people on grounds of gender, race, or age.
During COVID-19 we have had to suspend tenant involvement due to recruitment happening on-line, but now we are back in the room, so to speak, we are really looking at innovative ways of getting the most involvement we can in partnership with our tenants.
Peter's role on the interview panel
Peter is a 43-year-old man, with mild learning disabilities, who receives support involving everyday tasks, shopping, cooking cleaning etc. Peter has its own tenancy and works very hard on keeping his flat clean and tidy. Peter is not the most confident of people as he has a slight speech impediment which can make it difficult
to understand him when talking so being part of the interview panel and asking his own questions was a big challenge for him.
Peter chose his own questions with help from the staff who support him at home, independent of the recruiting panel.
Peter was able to ask his own questions to each candidate and other panel members were able to clarify any parts of the question candidates did not understand as Peter is not always easy to understand if you don’t know him well.
Peter contacted the successful candidate to offer them the job! Peter reflected on the process;
"Scary!". "Really enjoyed it". "Will I be able to do it again?".
Malc Shiner, Support Coordinator said;
"We started doing this to continue the empowerment of our tenants in the process of employing staff. Who better to have input into this than the very people being supported? We have done this a few times now and it has always been a positive experience for all tenants. It has built their confidence, increased their self-esteem and a chance to do something that they would find difficult to experience in any other service. Interviewees also get the opportunity to meet and interact with those that they will work with right at the start of their career, giving them a small taster of what the future could be like as part of the PILS family".
What next and looking forward
PILS are hoping to use photos and video footage in our adverts in order to show candidates our commitment to
involving tenants in the recruitment process and showing what they can expect if they come to interview.
In the future PILS want to look at how we involve our tenants who don’t use speech as their way of communication in the interview process. Potentially as part of the interview, all candidates will be asked to do a project or test with the tenants designed to see how they interact with people.
Tracey Denny, Head of Service Localities and Social Care Operations said;
"It’s great to see what the service is doing to involve people in recruitment and something we want to ensure we build on and see happening across the rest of our teams".
Adult social care stakeholder group
The work of Adult Social Care continues to be supported by our Stakeholder Group, who meet regularly to discuss any updates and influence the improvements of the service. The group is made up of Coventry residents who are experienced in how services work.
June, one of the new members, said;
"One of my personal reasons for joining the Adult Social Care Stakeholder Group was to be involved in the development and improvement of services. I have a combination of experience in both my previous working life and in my personal life and now that I am retired I am keen to share and use this experience to help improve outcomes for people living in Coventry. I am passionate about good Mental Health Services and supporting people, their family, friends and carers who support them with the right information and advice at
the right time. The Adult Social Care Offer is an example of how the group has been involved in the production of information and our views and suggestions have been incorporated to ensure the statement is clear and accessible for all".