Health and Social Care
This Have Your Say part of the Devon County Council (DCC) website covers the People part of DCC, which commissions and provides services for individuals, such as social care and education.
Within the People part of DCC we have an Involvement and Equalities Team, which comes under the Quality Assurance part of social care commissioning. This team exists to ensure all users of services for adults and children, and the wider public, are able to give their views on the services we commission or provide – and are told how their views have influenced (or not influenced) those services. This is part of DCC’s ‘You Said We Did’ approach to involvement, engagement and consultation. The team also helps ensure the Council promotes equality and diversity under the Equality and Human Rights Act 2010.
The Involvement & Equalities Teams consists of;
Paul Giblin – Involvement Manager – paul.giblin@devon.gov.uk
Kathryn Bird – Senior Involvement Officer (Adults) – kathryn.bird@devon.gov.uk
Sophie Ellis – Senior Involvement Officer (Children and Young People) – sophie.ellis@devon.gov.uk
Sally O’Donnell – Involvement Officer – sally.odonnell@devon.gov.uk
Whilst DCC’s ‘one council’ approach has joined together services for adults and children in the People grouping, there are significant differences in the way in which adults and children’s involvement takes place. Both sets of activities come together in our Joint Engagement Strategy which is implemented by our Joint Engagement Board, spanning Devon County Council’s Adults and Children’s social care commissioning and that of Devon’s two Clinical Commissioning Groups.
The Joint Engagement Baord (JEB) meets four times a year to ensure that consultations on health and social care issues are shared with as many stakeholders as possible.
Between the meetings we send out a newsletter to all JEB partners, keeping them up to date on current engagement activity.
There are 3 levels of engagement:
- Strategic – The Joint Engagement Board (JEB) meets four times a year to give service users and carers a direct voice on the way in which Health and Social Care consultation is carried out.
- Change – Healthwatch Devon faciltates an Experts Panel which is a cross-section of service users and carers who give feedback on items presented to them by project managers implementing the adult social care Putting People First programme and relevant Clinical Commissioning Group change managers.
- Operational monitoring – the Service Delivery Monitoring Group gives service users and carers a say on how we involve them in monitoring our services and contracts.
In this way we ensure that the issues we are engaging service users and carers on match the priority activities for Devon County Council and NHS Devon.