Early help, care and support, and transition for disabled children: Conwy County Borough Council

We undertook an inspection with assistance from Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) (External link) and explored how Conwy County Borough Council is providing early help, care and support and seamless transition for disabled children and their families.

Transition in this context can mean moving from children’s to adult's services in social care, from children’s to adult's health services or from one phase of education to the next.

The inspection identifies that current practice results in good outcomes for children as well as areas for improvement and barriers to progress.

Key Findings

Strengths

Well-being – we found managers and practitioners are promoting a positive attitude towards disabled children, ensuring that they are consistently seen as children first and achieving good outcomes.

People: voice and choice – we found practitioners build trusting and meaningful relationships with disabled children and their families. They use a variety of approaches to ensure they are able to communicate with disabled children.

Partnerships, integration and co-production – we found practitioners work well together and the co-location of staff from different disciplines supports disabled children and their families to be directed more easily to appropriate services.

Prevention and early intervention – we found senior managers are aware that access to early intervention is key to mitigating the need for statutory services. They are focussed on building and promoting peoples own strengths and resilience in line with the principles of Social Services and Wellbeing (Wales) Act 2014.

Areas for improvement

Well-being – we recommends that Managers and practitioners ensure ‘what matters’ conversations are fully embedded in practice and the specific personal outcomes people want to achieve are always identified and recorded. The quality of assessments and care and support plans should be improved to ensure they are consistently of a good quality.

People voice and choice –we identified that with the development of Welsh Community Care Information System (WCCIS), managers and practitioners will need to ensure the voice and views of disabled children and their parents, and the personal outcome they want to achieve, are consistently captured in the assessment and care and support plans.

Partnerships, integration and co-production – we identified a need for the local authority and the health board to jointly develop their commissioning to ensure it is sufficient to meet the needs of disabled children with complex needs.

Next steps

We expect the local authority and local health board to give attention to areas for improvement in the report. We will monitor progress through our on-going performance evaluation activity with Conwy County Borough Council.

To see all our findings and recommendations, read the full report below.