The Health Social Care & Well Being Overview & Scrutiny Board will meet for the final time on Tuesday 3rd April.
Councillors on the Board will take some time during this meeting to review the work they have carried out this year and to reflect on performance. They will look at what has worked well this year and what aspects of their work they would make improvements to. The councillors will identify topics that may need to be carried over to next year and they will also discuss possible areas of work which could feed into the development of work plans for 2012/13.
This year the councillors focused their efforts on two important areas of the Council’s work. In the first half of the year councillors provided “critical friend” challenge to the development of a business case for a Local Authority Trading Company to provide adult social care in Swansea. Councillors did this by forming a small task and finish group which gathered evidence on behalf of the Board. The task and finish group spoke to the Council’s Corporate Director and internal contract and procurement officers, contracted external care home providers, contracted domiciliary care providers and officers and councillors from other local authorities. Once the evidence had been gathered the task and finish group presented its findings to the Board. The Board then presented its evidence based views to the Cabinet Member and concluded that there were too many risks and that further investigative work was needed on the development of a local authority trading company.
In the second half of the year the Board carried out a review of support services for carers in Swansea. The Board took just 3 months to scope the review, collect evidence and write its final report with recommendations for the Cabinet Member. Again, the Board formed a small task and finish group of councillors which collected evidence from a range of important people and organisations in this field. The review was well documented on our and you can read the final report and recommendations here
Overall this year the councillors on the Board have worked well together as a cross-party group and this is reflected in the well thought out and evidence based conclusions and recommendations in the Board’s main areas of work. Task and finish groups have been well attended and with attendance at Board meetings at 75%, the average across all Boards is 66.6%. The Board has also had good levels of engagement from stakeholders and has consulted with 28 representatives from 12 separate organisations. The new Board formed in May will continue to build on the successes of this year.
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