Sue emphasises the importance of trust and transparency in professional settings, comparing it to person-centered and personalized care. She discusses the need for consistency in delivering services, regardless of who provides them. Sue reflects on their experience with the Norfolk County Council and the ICB, stressing the significance of quality teams and the importance of collaborative work among multidisciplinary teams. She describes their roles in clinical case management, commissioning, monitoring, and quality assurance, highlighting how close collaboration can lead to better outcomes and cost savings in care.

Transcript:

 What does trust and transparency mean to you, alongside your experience of it?

It’s huge. It’s core, trust and transparency is always how I’ve worked. If I can’t do something, I will tell people if I know I’m pushing a boundary professionally now, but I do it anyway then I will say, I’ll give it a go.

But trust and transparency is as important as person centered and personalization. It’s no different because trust and transparency, what you need for a contract just to provide a service let alone for the person who actually delivers it when they come through your front door.

And what difference does that make when that’s in place?

And it’s true if it’s in place. Because we’ve not really had it consistently. So it’s about consistency. It shouldn’t be down to, oh, here comes Bridget, because  we know she’s good. Okay, we can relax.

It’s about everybody. It doesn’t matter who walks through that door. They all take the same approach, attitude, time, and care. And that’s really, that’s what quality is isn’t it?

How do you feel we how do we make sure that people do receive a great experience of supporting care and consistent care?

I think you need to look at the whole system because, everyone keeps saying the system is broken, that’s a sort of easy term really. That doesn’t mean to  say you actually change anything. You say it’s broken, you know what? How are you are gonna rebuild it. You can’t rebuild it.

It’s too big. I keep going back to quality because I feel within Norfolk County Council and the Intergrated Care Board, the quality teams are vital. When I was a Clinical case manager with the community learning disability teams we worked really closely. We did commissioning and we did monitoring. I was also a nurse, so I was also doing nursing with the people I supported and I also replaced the social worker. I was doing three jobs at once really, but we worked so closely with contracts. We work so closely with QA (Quality Assurance).  And we worked so closely with the rest of the multidisciplinary team and that worked well.

It didn’t suit all the nurses. They don’t like care management. I quite enjoyed it ’cause I quite like knowing how much things are gonna cost and you put the contract together. ’cause I found that interesting. But because we worked so closely, we were able to save money. We supported QA (Quality Assurance)

So if there was an issue with a provider, I’d say I’ve got two people who live there or whatever. So we would go in as a team. Yeah.