By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporter
A review is looking into why the number of people contacting Powys People Direct about adult services has increased.
In the Adult Performance report for June, figures show that the number of contacts has increased dramatically during the past year.
In June 2017 there were 80 contacts.
But by this June that figure had shot up to 313.
Despite the increase in contacts the number of referrals due to this has fallen.
Referrals from contacts in June 2017 were 69, or 86 per cent.
This June the figure stood at 103 or 33 per cent.
On Wednesday, September 12, the Health Care and Housing Scrutiny Committee will be discussing the report which was written back in June.
The report also shows there is a need to recruit 37 permanent staff particularly in the south of the county to reduce the need for further agency numbers.
Adult Services were inspected back in January this year and was prompted by concerns raised by issues identified during the damning Children's Services inspection in October 2017.
Due to the criticisms faced by one Social Services department, Powys County Council was able to put resources into the Adult Services department to avoid a similarly damning inspection report.
Despite this, there were still many criticisms including a lack of consistency in the care and support that people received.
An improvement programme has received £6.5 million.
The report is broken down into three topics:
What’s Working Well,
What Are We Worried About
And
What Do We Need to Do?
According to the report – What’s Working Well includes:
- The number of supervisions being completed has increased from 34 per cent. in December 2017 to 96 per cent in June 2017.
- Domiciliary Care capacity in North Powys had increased.
- A soft market test has shown initial interest in the potential future of the authority's 12 care homes.
What Are We Worried About? includes:
- Challenges in retaining staff.
- The accuracy of housekeeping.
- Lack of domiciliary care capacity in some geographical areas.
In the What Do We Need To Do? category, action needs to be taken on a range of issues that include:
- Increasing domiciliary care capacity.
- improving the accuracy of real-time reporting mechanisms.
- Benchmarking data to be obtained from comparator authorities.
- Improving the performance report.