Adult Services

The challenges ahead

The challenges in the adult services sector are well documented. The recent White Paper (‘Our Health, Our Care, Our Say’) highlighted several key areas of development for adult care:

• Greater flexibility
• The push for a more personal service tailored to the specific care needs of individuals
• Further integration of public, private and voluntary services
• Better access
• Greater independence

The restructuring of the sector

Primary care trusts have been reconfigured in order to bring about change. The result of this for most local authorities is that a whole new set of relationships - both formal and informal - need to be established. Budgets are becoming tighter despite demographics indicating that more and more people will need greater support later in life.

All these are challenges enough, but the bigger issue is perhaps an unspoken, less tangible one. On the back of the ‘split’ between adult and children’s services after ‘Every Child Matters’, local authorities rushed (quite rightly) to set up new, integrated children’s services departments. What would happen with the adult services side of the equation was not, for some, a priority – it was often left as it was or bundled in with other services such as housing or culture and leisure.

It was the Director of Children’s Services posts that authorities pushed to fill; they took centre stage and were seen by some as more attractive or more pivotal. Now, two or three years down the line (helped by clarification from the DoH about the role of Director of Adult Services), authorities are finally working out the best structure for adult social care/adult services, and trying to find the best people to fill these widely different and challenging posts.

Crucially, members and chief executives are now more attuned to the fact that these posts are vital in delivering a large number of their priorities, as well as handling a huge proportion of a council’s budget.

Defining a new model

From a recruitment perspective, one of the key issues within this sector is that there is no set model for the new adult services structure and it is therefore more complex than other areas of local government. This has resulted in members and chief executives having more of a free rein to tailor the structure to suit their local priorities.

Somehow, children’s services appeared simpler; by and large, education was put with children’s social care, and the task was to meld these two services into one. With adult social care, the mix is far more variable and complex. The question is what else goes into the pot? The options can include adult education, housing, leisure, culture/libraries, regeneration, environmental services, and neighbourhood services, to name but a few. The list goes on, the implications are endless.

Firstly, it could be argued that adult social services could become lost in a very broad ‘community services’ directorate, and its importance be diluted. Secondly, does the director of a broad portfolio need to have a social care background? Conversely, if you do keep the range of services in a directorate ‘narrow’, and focus on adult social services, some candidates would say that the director or AD role is less strategic and offers fewer development opportunities.

Getting it right

All these questions and opinions make this area one of the most challenging in recruitment terms, but the rewards for getting it right can be huge.

We have an excellent track record in adult services senior recruitment and experience in developing adult services structures.