Big Community Conversation questions and answers - Adult Services
NTSP Big Community Conversation questions and answers
Please see a list of the questions you can find below. Please scroll down to find the answers to each question.
1. What is the Council doing to improve social care, including support for older adults and those with mental health difficulties?
2. How can transition services for young people moving from social care to Continuing Healthcare (CHC) funding be improved?
3. How is the council making education, employment, and assisted living more inclusive for SEND children and adults?
4. Why is there no dedicated lead officer for Autism services and communication with agencies, especially for adults over 25?
1. What is the Council doing to improve social care, including support for older adults and those with mental health difficulties?
The Council has a range of statutory duties under the Care Act 2014 to:
- Promote wellbeing and prevent, reduce or delay the need for care and support
- Providing access to information and advice
- Market shaping and commissioning of care and support from providers in the market
- Person centred care and support planning
- Safeguarding
- Integration and partnership working
In order to ensure that these key areas are being complied with the Council, through its Adult Social Care service has a range of measures and assurances on this. This includes both internal assurance and external assurance.
Internal assurance will include areas of work such as audits of work undertaken by social workers and other members of staff that are directly involved in working with people, as well as monitoring of care provision, dealing with safeguarding enquiries that are submitted as well as responding to complaints and compliments.
Any areas for improvement, development or changes are covered through the service’s Directorate Action Plan that is updated and reviewed through a regular reporting cycle within the Council.
Externally, the Care Quality Commission now has a role to undertake inspections of local authority social care services and assess compliance against the Care Act 2014. This is a national programme of work that started in April 2024 and North Tyneside Council was the process for us started in late 2024 through to early 2025, within an inspection report being published on 9 July 2025.
North Tyneside Council: local authority assessment - Care Quality Commission
The Council is developing its Improvement Plan following the publication of the report. This is currently going through the internal assurance and sign off process.
This will be monitored and reported on for each of the actions that have been identified and included.
2. How can transition services for young people moving from social care to Continuing Healthcare (CHC) funding be improved?
Ensuring a successful transition into adulthood remains a focus for adult social care. The Transition Improvement Programme is now in its fifth year of a six-year strategic plan, aimed at enhancing outcomes for young people moving into adult services.
We continue to work in close partnership with the Integrated Care Board (ICB) to review and refine the transfer arrangements for Continuing Healthcare (CHC) case management, ensuring a smooth and coordinated approach.
3. How is the council making education, employment, and assisted living more inclusive for SEND children and adults?
From an Adult Social Care perspective we would undertake assessments under the Care Act 2014 to determine eligible needs and then how those needs are to be met.
This may include access to an employment pathway, where this is appropriate and could include some form of voluntary work or even paid work. This will all be determined through the assessment process and the conversations we have with individuals and / or their informal carers.
The move for someone into supported living and living independently (from their previous accommodation - family home) will again be considered as part of the assessment and support planning process, taking account of the short and longer term aspirations of individuals to move to independent living. This is looked at on an individual basis and picked up over time when reviews or reassessments take place, we also consider the holistic approach to housing need and what types of accommodation and property we need over a period of time and link in with colleagues in the Housing Strategy team to feed that into requirements.
4. Why is there no dedicated lead officer for Autism services and communication with agencies, especially for adults over 25?
We do not have a lead single officer or a dedicated team for autistic people that present to Adult Social Care. We do not have a clinically led approach to this but more about looking at the whole needs of the individual and how they are supported.
If a person has a learning disability or a mental health issues, they are more likely to be aligned to either the Learning Disability Team or the Community Treatment Team for mental health, where they will be allocated to specific workers with experience and expertise in those areas. Others without a primary need linked to learning disability or mental health will be allocated to our Community Wellbeing Teams, which support adults over 18 years of age.
We do have a partnership approach to understanding autism and looking at various areas of work that we need to progress and make improvements in. Our Autism Strategy (Living with Autism | North Tyneside Council) was launched in 2021 and has a number of actions linked to it across a whole range of partner agencies alongside different Council departments.