Clydesdale Children and Justice Services team

Our iMatter Journey

Who are we –

The Clydesdale Children & Justice Services Team is a Clydesdale wide service providing social work intervention under the main legislative framework of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 and the Children and Young Person’s (Scotland) Act 2014.

Children and their families come to this service with a wide range of issues some with one issue others with multiple. The range of issues include; neglect, physical and sexual abuse, exposure to domestic violence, parental substance abuse, youth offending, additional support needs and  behavioural challenges. The core of the teams work is based on assessment of need, risk management and formulating and managing children’s plans.

The service provides advice, support and education covering a wide range of Childrens services including:

• Autism
• Child Protection
• Kinship
• Additional Support Needs

We provide care in a variety of settings including home, school, clinic, third sector etc.

Currently we have approximately 28 members of staff working across the service.

Background

We were asked to participate in iMatter as part of Child and Justice Services. This was the first time iMatter had been used in our service and everyone was keen to take part and get team reports.

 iMatter came at a time when it was really good to have an overview of the team’s perspective as we had undertaken a senior management structure change. The teams achieved great response rates showing a real commitment from staff to having their views noted and due to the recent restructure we collectively decided to look at all the team reports as a whole and agree what actions we could all be involved in to develop the teams and the service allowing the staff to have a say in the operational management of the service and how they are supported.

We held an initial meeting with the management team to look at the collective results and how we could take them forward.

What did we do

Logo:

One of the issues we have is due to the team covering the rural area of Clydesdale. We have difficulty in retaining and recruiting staff. The long winter journeys and additional costs working in a geographical rural area often puts people off. One of our team came up with a logo for the team # “love Lanark” which gives a sense of the depth and warmth of the relationships built up between staff, managers and the local environment. We are considering using this logo in future e mails etc.

Caseloads:

We acknowledged that we had to address and support staff to remain within their posts and that first and foremost we needed to have clarity of how work we accept is prioritised. We agreed a priority was to monitor and review caseloads to create manageable workloads. Team leaders have now undertaken exercises around caseloads making adjustments where necessary to ensure even distribution of casework.

Development Session:

We agreed that we would look at the strengths within our teams and consider weighting caseloads to match those strengths and areas of interest. We asked the question, were we set up correctly to manage all the complex areas of intervention that we undertook?

Recognising this should not be a standalone task of the management team we arranged a team development session where one part of the session would be facilitated by the service manager around about how well do we manage our business; are there ways we could manage it better and what would make a difference to staff in managing very complex caseloads?

We had table top exercise around all the areas of pressure for the team and asked for suggestions as to how we might manage these differently. The feedback from the groups was supportive of change and most importantly what might work for them as alternative options. They identified what areas could be grouped together and then as a further exercise what areas they could see themselves working within. This provided a lot of information, suggestions and views as to how we could better manage the competing demands within the team. At the end of the session we agreed that as a team the service manager would meet with the team leaders to discuss all the suggestions put forward then meet again as a wider group to discuss a tangible plan for implementation.

Celebrating Achievements

The feedback from staff gave a clear overview that at times there is not enough consideration given to taking stock of what we do well rather than responding to situations where things have not went as well and that we should celebrate our achievements.

To rectify this the team have, over the year, put forward certain pieces of work for awards and have had a royal visit to ARCH ( Autism Resource Co-ordination Hub).

Overall iMatter provided us with the opportunity to sit down and work together to identify and focus our energy on priorities and progress these priorities over the year. Some work is still in progress and we will continue to progress these as a team over the coming year.