Sheffield City Council

IMPOWER and Sheffield Council staff worked together to develop high impact interventions and change behaviours in the adult social care journey. Specifically:

1. Information and Advice: Re-working the two key documents that signpost to the service according to behavioural science good practice. We restructured and rewrote the documents to promote a greater focus on independence and self-service, reducing the reliance on Council provided services, and high cost contact points within the Council for information.
2. Initial Contact: Placing adult social care, safeguarding and Occupational Therapist experts with the Adult Access team, to join customer calls at the first point of contact. This was focused on the twin benefit of optimising outcomes for clients at initial contact, and improving relationships and knowledge sharing between Call Agents and adult social care.
3. Reviews and Reassessment: Changing the letters sent to clients and carers to appropriately prime them for discussions around increasing independence.

Across the areas we also used behavioural science coaching for managers and front line staff, to help them set appropriate defaults and norms and use solution focused and independence centred language.

Although only in place for a short period during this project, the impact of these interventions was significant.

Information and advice: The evaluation of the revised Information and Advice Guides gave universally positive feedback from different sources. Key findings were that the information was easier to navigate and were more effective at signposting to alternative options rather than drawing people inappropriately to the Council for support

Initial contact: The interventions with the Adult Access team delivered a major shift in demand, including

• A 15% reduction in new contact assessments being opened
• 25% reduction in new adult social care safeguarding referrals being opened
• 50% of calls joined by the adult social care expert were positively signposted to alternative support, where previously a contact assessment would have been opened
• 15% of calls joined by the safeguarding expert resulted in no further action, where previously a referral would have been opened

Reviews and reassessment: The behaviour insight-driven approach in Reviews and Reassessment has become the main thrust of the change and savings approach in 2016/17 in both Older Adults and Learning Disability services.

IMPOWER continue to work with Sheffield City Council to support and enable the acceleration of change activity to realise the £10.3m of savings through the programme business case.

To discuss this case study, or our wider work in Adult Social Care, please contact Jeremy Cooper on jcooper@impower.co.uk