Embrace change: harness the power of innovation to do better

In some areas, like Worcestershire, the Council has worked in partnership with community and unpaid carer groups and a technology partner to improve the hospital discharge process by providing technology-enabled care (TEC) to people leaving hospital, giving confidence that new ways of working can help people stay at home. 

This kind of partnership-working was, in fact, evident across many of the projects. We have seen in Cornwall how the Carefree App is providing a win-win model of support to unpaid carers, helping them with free respite breaks in unused hotels to reduce the risk of them burning out. Simultaneously this has made them aware of the Council’s wider unpaid carers offering, and increased hotel occupancy—a great partnership across public, private and charitable sectors. 

A partnership example at scale can be seen in the North East, where thirteen Local Authorities collaborating with the NHS and Integrated Care Board commissioned a single approach to identifying unpaid carers that were not known to the public services in order to be able to engage and support them better. 

And outside of the ARF, we see that a partnership approach to designing innovation, implementing improvements and learning and adapting to change is crucial for Councils to gain buy-in from their own staff, the care workforce, and, most importantly of all, the people in their communities whom they serve.  

We have worked with a number of Councils in the last few years around digital maturity, helping identify where they are on their digital journeys and ensuring they understand what the community and workforce need from digital innovation. Mirroring a key learning from the ARF, we have seen that digital literacy levels are low (which leads to fear of transformative change), and that time and effort need to be put into shaping a business case for change. If that is done well, then there are multiple benefits to be reaped from it.  

We use a co-production approach at SCIE to ensure that digital changes are not thrust upon people but made in response to their needs.  It’s great to see from the ARF that almost every team, of which many have digital elements, used co-production to support the design and delivery of their projects. 

We all know how resource-strapped the adult social care sector is, and if we want to improve ways of working, take on risk in a considered way and try to transform and improve what we do, then we need to embrace change.  

We want to build on this work to plan what a good social care innovation system should look like – we need your help, we’re looking for partners interested in working with us to help map out innovation journeys, share learnings from work in progress and develop support to help make innovation business as usual. 

Join us on this journey, and get in touch to share your stories, challenges and learnings with us.