Improvement Requires Partnership: Our Response to the CQC Assessment of Norfolk County Council

Norfolk Care Association has carefully considered the Care Quality Commission’s assessment report, which rates Norfolk County Council’s Adult Social Care as requiring improvement. You can read the full report here.

Many adult social care providers will recognise the emotional impact of receiving an adverse rating, particularly when it follows significant effort and commitment. We sympathise with our capable, hard-working colleagues at Norfolk County Council and acknowledge the dedication of teams delivering services under challenging circumstances.

We would also underline that many of the issues within adult social care are ultimately driven by a lack of investment by central government. Social care has consistently been underfunded by successive governments and this continues to put unsustainable pressure on clients, unpaid carers, providers and system partners.

For providers, a negative CQC report often brings significant and immediate impacts on their organisation, such as the suspension of placements. We would always encourage providers to engage seriously with the findings of CQC reports, even where they may disagree with some of the content. We expect this behaviour to be modelled by Norfolk County Council.

Many of the issues highlighted by the CQC, such as waiting times for assessments and reviews, the quality of discharge and placement information, and feedback on safeguarding concerns, are areas providers have raised consistently over many years.

Norfolk Care Association has at times struggled to obtain responses and data from Norfolk County Council on these issues. We do not believe that the most senior leaders are sufficiently engaged with providers in addressing them.

We are therefore concerned that initial statements by Norfolk County Council (see the EDP article here and the statement from Ian Wake, Executive Director of Adult Social Services) suggest that these issues are not fully recognised, are regarded as already in-hand, or that nearly good is considered good enough.

We are yet to see evidence that internal transformation programmes are resulting in meaningful improvements, and we have struggled to obtain timely and detailed updates on key issues.

Norfolk County Council has emphasised its desire to move towards a relationship-based model of care. We welcome a relationship-based approach and much of what is set out in Norfolk County Council’s long-term vision. However, this must be built on a firm foundation of effective core processes that support day-to-day interactions with providers, residents and clients.

We therefore believe that Norfolk County Council must show greater acceptance of the improvement work required and commit to a renewed and concerted effort to address these persistent challenges.

Norfolk Care Association’s vision is for adults in Norfolk and Waveney to receive the social care they need from high-quality, sustainable providers working collaboratively with local authorities and system partners.

This requires an outstanding local authority working effectively alongside providers and other partners. We are committed to working with Norfolk County Council to achieve this and look forward to them engaging constructively in the development of our sector.