‘People don’t have to keep repeating their story to new social workers’

People with learning disabilities in Worcestershire are avoiding hospital admissions and living more independent lives because they are being given a named social worker.

The community learning disabilities team at Worcestershire County Council was able to alter its service design during the first stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and went on to keep the named worker model because of the clear benefits to everyone involved.

Feedback from people with learning disabilities and their families has been positive.

A carer said: "The named worker provides us with continuity and a single point of contact. This is so refreshing..."

Another said: "This has benefited our daughter so much. She will talk openly and freely with her worker. This has never happened before."

The named social worker approach sees a specific social worker assigned to work with an individual or family as their main point of contact and advocate. It aims to provide consistency and continuity.

The model in Worcestershire is being rolled out to cover 1,500 people with learning disabilities.

The Worcestershire team has been able to ditch its old-style duty service and instead offer each person with a learning disability a named social worker, enabling lasting relationships to be established.

Natalie Lackenby, area manager for the Community Learning Disabilities Team South, at Worcestershire County Council, says: “From a management perspective we get consistency in recording, and cases are easier to pick up. It’s a more efficient way of managing Community Deprivation of Liberty applications, and annual reviews.

“And service users don’t have to keep repeating their story to new social workers. This is particularly important for people for whom communication may be a challenge.”

Jessica Warboys, a social worker on the team, says the benefits on the ground have been clear: “We can work a lot quicker because get to know people, and so assessments become easier, and capacity assessments particularly are more accurate when a person is comfortable with you and you know about their history.

“When you are a new worker to someone, you find they can be dubious in terms of who you are, but when you get to know them more, they are able to talk more easily.

“You find you can do more in-depth assessments.

“I recently helped a man with fluctuating capacity, and because I had been his worker for a while I knew this was the case. So when it came to assessment I was able to find he does have capacity.

“But if I hadn’t known him so well, I may have found the opposite.

“This single decision changed the path of his future. He wants to get his own house. Had he been found to lack capacity, he may have ended up in a residential home.”

Parents of children with learning disabilities have also benefited from the new way of working, Natalie says:

“They have the confidence to pick up the phone, once they have a named worker, and across services, we as social workers also have continuity with other professionals.”

The 'Named Worker Approach’ is closely aligned to the Named Social Worker ethos set out by BASW England, the importance of which is underlined in their Homes Not Hospitals campaign.

Between 2016 and 2018, the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) and the Innovation Unit supported nine local authorities to develop a Named Social Worker approach with funding from the DHSC.

Early findings showed service users:

• experienced better, more trusted relationships with social workers
• had the ability to shape plans that responded to individual communication needs 
• benefited from support that better met their needs 
• felt listened to by their social worker
• experienced smoother discharges, greater placement stability and overturned restrictive decision-making.

For social workers:

• confidence to be able to deliver a meaningful person-centred plan increased from 47 to 94 per cent
• confidence to advocate for the people they work with increased from 43 to 88 per cent
• there were higher levels of satisfaction with quality of work.

In terms of return on investment (ROI), for every £1 invested by local authorities, there were anticipated savings or costs avoided of £5.14, with 89 per cent of savings directly benefiting the local authorities involved.

Subsequent pilots and adapted models have also proved successful.

For Worcestershire, the Covid pandemic provided the catalyst for experimenting with the model.

"When I started in March 2020, we were pretty much straight into the first lockdown so we found we had to do things differently,” says Natalie.

“We needed to put some structure back in place for people who might find the challenges of the pandemic extremely hard.

“Normal services and day centres all closed. We needed a way to reassure and stay connected with our group of about 750 service users. So we implemented regular welfare calls, and in fact, once we had made the changes, we were surprised at how well everyone coped.”

The service redesign was a completely new way of doing things, which meant the team could move away from the lack of continuity that typically goes with a duty system.

“The group is relatively static compared to other services, so we were able to divide up into smaller groups and give each a named worker who would check in with them every week,” adds Natalie.

“It led us to wonder why we couldn’t work like this all the time. If we hadn’t had the Covid-19 pandemic the new model may not have come about.

“Now we have a blueprint on how the named worker approach can be implemented, so other teams can potentially do it.”

Under the new system cases are divided between ‘pending’ and ‘active’.

 “Active should remain relatively the same, within safe limits, and pending cases are those waiting for review or those that have a duty issue,” says Natalie.

“Sometimes the active tray may become too much, so we have Advanced Social Work Professionals who can step in with the flexibility to relieve the pressure. This means they get additional experience across lots of different areas.

Early feedback has shown there is a will on all sides for the model to remain in place.

Natalie says: “There’s a real desire for it to continue. Social workers were asked if the new way of working was influencing their decision to stay in their role, and 75 per cent said yes.

“Also, if we receive challenges, for example from parents contesting our observations, our decision-making or way of working, we can often evidence our work with a service user going back over years, enabling us to back up our position with evidence.”

Other local authorities are showing interest in adopting the named worker approach.

“We’ve already met with Coventry and Warwickshire,” Natalie adds. “We acknowledge it won’t be a model for all teams – for example it may not work in services for older people due to the higher turnover.

“And we acknowledge that there are still times when work with a person comes to a natural conclusion and there may be good reason to change social workers.

“But we definitely see the benefit in terms of mental health or trauma-informed work.

“We start from the basis that it has to be a positive for the people we support, and from a social worker perspective, there is a greater opportunity for relationship-based practice.

"I know there is a real willingness to adopt this model, but understandable reluctance due to the perceived pressure it may put workers under and need for additional resources. 

“Our findings offer a different narrative to those assumptions and as a team we would love to motivate others to give it a try.”

Jessica adds: “It’s what keeps me in the Worcestershire team.

“At times, like everyone, I’ve questioned whether I want to be a social worker, but learning disabilities is where I want to be. The relationships I build mean I can perform my role better.”

If you would like to learn more about implementing the named social worker model for your own team, you can contact Natalie at NLackenby@worcestershire.gov.uk.