Ageless at Work - Skills for Care

These ‘entitlements’ or expectations are likely to result in a number of key changes in how the system
and the workforce ‘works’. These elements were identified by Waddilove (2004) as:
Integration of the health and social care sector
Partnership working models, including Strategic Service Delivery Partnerships
Needs led services rather than institution-led services
User centrality as against the person being ‘service-ridden’ or ‘service driven’
Transparency and ease of access
Role slippage between professional groupings
Role slippage between formal and informal caring networks
Shared, or at least cross-referenced, systems of inter-professional training and workforce
development
De-professionalisation of some tasks
Adoption of some industrial models and ‘comprehensive performance assessment’.
Waddilove (2004) also identified a series of potential blocks and impediments to the construction of
new roles and new reconfigured ways of working. These include cultural barriers between
organisations and professional groupings with different systems of training, socialisation, value base,
language and ideology. Success, it is identified, will depend:
“on high level strategic analysis coupled with a commitment to learning organisation principles
and modes of learning. They also suggest that organisations will need to build in mechanisms
to address issues of shared concern, to problem solve and to plan jointly, learning from each
other’s failures and successes. This will rely on a genuine ‘no blame’ culture and may need
structural supports like action learning sets or quality circles”.
What are the priorities for action?
Reforming social care to achieve personalisation will require a huge cultural, transformational and
transactional change in all parts of the adult social care system, the scale of which ‘should not be
underestimated’ (Department for Health, 2008):
“The Government has recognised that to meet this goal, the system will need to undergo
further significant redesign in process, practice and culture to ensure people have access to
high quality information and advice, appropriate early interventions and can exercise choice
and control over the services and support they need. It will also require investment in training
and support for the workforce to enable them to meet the challenges of this new way of
working.”
Department of Health, 2009
A new strategy for the adult social care workforce Working to Put People First groups priorities for
workforce development under six ‘key themes’ (Department for Health, 2009c):
The leadership of local employers in workforce planning, whether in the public, private, or third
sectors and of Directors of Adult Social Services in the strategic workforce commissioning role;
Ageless at Work: Change workplace cultures, development skills. Good practice report 9