7 July - A ‘Vision’ for improving Adults’ Social Care in Bexley
Councillor
Ward-Wilson must
have put a shilling in the net meter because the webcast worked properly for her Adults’ Services meeting.
Lisa Moore, you may remember was muted at Childrenְ’s
Services and one must wonder why Bexley Council keeps their incompetence in the public eye by letting it remain on their website; useless as ever.
Adults’ Services is usually a bit of a bore unless you are especially interested
in medics and the like making excuses for past failures. Will the new ‘Adult
Social Care Vision’ address the past problems?
The Director of Social Care spoke for four and a half minutes and said very little. “There is work to do” in a number of areas
and sheltered care is inadequate.
Councillor Read (Conservative, West Heath) said that the stated “working with managers and operational staff” is a
fine aspiration but “how and what is different to what has been done before”.
The new Deputy Director Jim Beale said that “culture shift takes time”. It will involve “getting people
together and talking and Making Bexley Even Better. We will be listening to staff.”
If the new management team is sincere about what it is saying it is
the most dreadful indictment of what went before.
Listening to staff is not a new management technique, except perhaps in Bexley.
Councillor Nicola Taylor (Labour, Erith) said there are an awful lot of things
that have been identified for improvement, "is there a priority list? What are you doing for voluntary carers?"
It was accepted that “some carers fall through the gaps”. Autism was singled out as something that must be
improved especially during the transition period from SEND to adulthood.
The Cabinet Member, Melvin Seymour, said that “successive governments have ignored carers because it saves money”.
Fixed 15 minute appointments, late running care appointments and cancelled
appointments are all problematical “and there is more work to do”. More day to
day flexibility is required. Reducing the number of care providers from 42 to
six should make administration and monitoring easier. “They will become Trusted Partners.”
Councillor Taylor asked if there was a Plan B if one of the providers ran into
difficulty. No, not really apart from monitoring their financial stability and
if necessary find another one.
Labour Councillor Baljeet Gill (Northumberland Heath) told of a 90 year old lady
let down by the 15 minute rule and Cabinet Member Seymour asked for any cases such as that be referred to him.
The meeting moved on to Primary Care issues. Losing GPs from the borough is a
problem but the Council is unable to influence the private businesses which employ GPs and set their rates of pay.
The well known difficulty of seeing a GP was acknowledged with some practices
only managing to provide 74% of appointments within two weeks and many patients
surveyed saying they are “resigned” to going straight to 111 or A&E.
Councillor Nicola Taylor thought that services were too reliant on digital. There will
always be people who cannot access digitally or may have insufficient minutes on
their phone to wait in long queues phone or data or memory to access mandatory
apps. Councillor Seymour was somewhat dismissive of such difficulties. “You can
only hold someone’s hand so far. No one in this borough is more than a mile from a library.”
Nicola reminded him that libraries are only open for a few days a week and her
local library was
inaccessible for years but she got nowhere, “I do not accept
at all that libraries are difficult to access.”
Ignoring the day to day experiences of ordinary people must surely lead to
electoral revenge. Oh, I think it just did!