North Lincolnshire Council assessment

Indicative score:

3 - Evidence shows a good standard

The local authority commitment:

We focus on continuous learning, innovation and improvement across our organisation and the local system. We encourage creative ways of delivering equality of experience, outcome and quality of life for people. We actively contribute to safe, effective practice and research.

Key findings for this quality statement

There was a learning culture embedded within the organisation through continuous learning, innovation, and improvement. Staff told us there were opportunities for learning and their own professional development. The practice development team led by the principal social worker supported the training and the development of best practice in teams. There were mechanisms in place to support a learning culture, for example social care forums, audits, feedback (compliments/complaints), line of sight practice sessions and reflective supervision.

The Experts Together workforce tool was embedded at all levels, ensuring that co-production with people with lived experience informed the development of strategies and contributed to the improvement of services. Experts with lived experience were involved in reflection, learning and feedback through training and conferences, for example in relation to safeguarding and person-centred care.

Pilots were used as a learning tool to trial new ways of working and target resources to address issues. For example, the accelerated discharge event for integrated discharge over a ‘perfect fortnight’, the forensic examination pilot and integrated community hub. Learning from pilots was evaluated with partners to inform future models of working. The local authority was open to using evaluation by external organisations to enhance learning.

A continual learning and improvement model was applied to work with partners, including the quality monitoring of registered providers, which encouraged a culture of continual learning and improvement in services. There was a culture of learning from communities to share the strengths of one community to address gaps elsewhere.

There was a range of systems to apply learning from themes and trends, for example in complaints, safeguarding adult reviews, serious incidents and national themes and trends. Surveys were used to understand people’s experiences to influence the future design and development of services. For example, a survey and engagement with unpaid carers was used to set the priorities for commissioning services for unpaid carers. A survey of care homes focused on healthcare support. This resulted in an action plan to ensure that people living in care homes had access to GP services to help prevent hospital admissions, as well as looking at the support care homes needed to enable them to better support discharge from hospital.