Cardiff Council required a solution to manage an unprecedented demand in children’s social care cases
Employing an outcomes-based approach Bloom, via NEPRO, provided the Council a managed service and access to an extensive pre-accredited supply chain that could provide the relevant services at less cost.
“Through Bloom we were able to engage with the council efficiently and help them access social care services they urgently needed in a compliant way.” - Sarah Pope, Managing Director, RT Group
“Each case was managed to a very high standard which was maintained through quality assurance processes” - Irfan Alam, Assistant Director of Children’s Services, Cardiff Council
Challenge
Cardiff Council required a service provider to develop and deliver an implementation and planned exit strategy. This was needed for a self-sufficient independent social work team. The chosen supplier would need to complete the work within budget and to a specific timeframe.
The Council also required the successful supplier to:
- Assist in reducing the caseloads of each in-house social worker to a maximum of 24
- Aid retention of in-house social workers within the Council
- Review of all CP, LAC and CIN systems within Cardiff Council
- Help mitigate and manage the risk to the service of the high number of caseloads
- To provide high quality, outcome-focused case management services
Solution
NEPRO provided a new way to procure specialist services for Cardiff Council who were facing significant financial constraints. An issue faced by many local authorities across the UK.
Bloom first worked with the Council to define an outcome-based requirement. Then shortlisted several trusted suppliers with proven capabilities who could complete the work.
The procurement was run as a mini-competition and responses were received from suppliers in just 10 days.
The successful supplier, RT Social Care, was given 700 cases to manage and spent two weeks with the Council to better understand the size and scale of the difficulties they were experiencing.
RT Social Care expertise in partnering with external agencies and their experience with similar children’s social care projects, meant that they were able to successfully achieve the project outcomes defined by the Council.
Outcome
More than 275 cases were closed, and 80 children were deregistered. RT Social Care also;
- Reviewed the Council’s high risk CSE cases, escalating them to Child Protection and worked with police to ensure offenders were prosecuted
- Issued a number of ICO applications for children who had been drifting in care
- Reviewed Children subject to full care orders and placed at home and where appropriate, prepared discharge applications
- Reviewed LAC cases leading to the rehabilitation of 5 children
