Social care governance is a framework for making sure that social care services provide excellent ethical standards of service and continue to improve them. Culture values, behaviours, decisions and processes are open to scrutiny as people develop safe and effective evidence-based practice. Good governance means that people recognise our accountability, people act on lessons learned and they are honest and open in seeking the best possible outcomes and results for society.
Social Care confronts enormous changes as local authorities and the efforts of health authorities have to deal with the heavy challenges of the Personalisation programme. Though, how can it be taken ahead in the present circumstances of important cuts in people’s financial support?
All have responsibility for the quality of the social care they provide. Achieving quality is a combination of individual, team and organisational responsibility. Organising that effectively is the purpose of social care governance. Evidence-based practice tells us that this is best achieved by teams reflecting in a structured way on the service they currently provide and then on how it could be developed. Social care is in the process of changing working methods, organisational systems and culture to achieve the range of intentions around creating a more personalised care for older people in our regions social care system. For example Personal budgets comprise funding from different agencies whilst individual budgets just comprise social care funding. The objective is to offer improved corresponding, greater personalised services which are readymade to match the person’s requirements. Therefore, people developing care governance have opportunities to make sure that their approach matches the changing nature of social care and contributes to looking at services from the perspective of the people who use them (Warren,