Innovation coaching: Applications focus on capacity, community and collaboration
Our new innovation coaching service has been running for a month and we can now tell you a bit more about how it’s going.
We launched the free service in September to help people get the best out of their ideas to improve care.
Our first two-week application window attracted 11 ideas, each with the potential to improve the lives of people accessing services. We’ve also heard about people who are already preparing applications for future windows.
Almost all of the applications we’ve received so far hit on one or more of three big themes: capacity, community and collaboration.
Capacity
Capacity and recruitment were themes we were expecting. They’re also the focus of our next application window, alongside retention.
Two councils contacted us with challenges related to recruitment and retention. One is seeing a long-running childcare service facing difficulties because of problems recruiting staff. Another has plans to increase retention in a particularly tough social work specialism through a mix of training and mentoring and wants help implementing them.
We also received an application from a social enterprise which wants to address the lack of ethnic minority people working in senior social care roles.
Community
A lot of our applicants saw members of the public as an important resource in supporting our care system and wanted to find new ways of tapping into that.
One council wants our help to decrease isolation and support health and well-being by encouraging community initiatives, including setting up a community-run café in a local day centre.
Another council wants to work with its commissioning team to boost the number of placements in the community for looked-after children.
We also received an application that focused on the successful pilot of a community-focused personal assistant recruitment campaign. The council that ran it wants to see the approach used more widely.
Collaboration
Neighbouring councils, the third sector and private providers all came up as organisations that applicants wanted new and stronger relationships with.
A local authority with a successful community hub wants to do more work with the community and voluntary sectors. It wants to bring different services together in a specific location and create a new 'front door' to adult services.
Two councils want to develop a collaboration around their offer in children’s early years, while working with and encouraging more care microenterprises is the focus of another council’s application.
Next steps
Our next step is to reach out to Social Care Wales’s internal experts in the areas of work our applicants have focused on.
We’ll then work with our applicants to complete an assessment tool and talk to them about their needs and what they hope to achieve through coaching.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our coaching offer, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re particularly interested in talking to people who have ideas to improve their practice that could be supported by coaching. If that sounds like you, please email innovationcoaching@socialcare.wales.