Interim Assistant Director

Social Work First are recruiting for...

East of England

Interim Assistant Director - Adult Safeguarding & Quality Assurance

£545 a day (inside IR35)

As Assistant Director for Safeguarding and Quality Assurance, you will lead our Adult Safeguarding and Adults Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub Services as well as act as the lead social work professional for all social care staff. You will provide advice, guidance and supporting to the Director of Adult Social Care on practice and risk to ensure our services meet all adult social care legal requirements. You will also be responsible for leading and driving quality assurance and practice development, ensuring the continuing improvement of practitioner skill and experience across the ASCS workforce in preparation for the new CQC inspection framework. To do so you will have advanced knowledge of national and international policies and their implications for practice. You will have in-depth knowledge on how to lead the implementation of these national guidelines and how to audit and assure the effectiveness and quality of services across all healthcare services against quality standards.

You will lead assurance for DMT, SAB and Regulatory Bodies in relation to safeguarding governance, practice and discharge of statutory duties and will lead best practice and compliance with MCA/LPs legislation. An immediate focus of this role will be to take the DMT lead on the Liberty Protection Safeguard (LPS) changes, leading and driving the required practice, structural and technology requirements. You will be the Councils strategic lead on; inputting to the national consultation, leading the delivery of new and updated policy, ensuring training and guidance and quality assurance processes are in place, communications with the Public, Providers and Partners is planned and delivered and ICT systems are developed, continuously improving . Your leadership will foster a positive culture of change that best enables practitioners to extend their skill, experience and flexibility to adapt to changing nature of demand in our services, with our Signs of Safety ethos at the heart of what we do.

You will be the councils lead officer of Local Safeguarding Boards/Partnerships in place, offering strategic oversight of the health and social care agenda for this arrangement and develop collaborative and effective relationships with key statutory partners. You will lead on the provision of expert advice, specialist supervision, coaching or support, for senior staff and managers involved in complex situations, assessment and management of risk, case conferences, police or legal interviews and court appearances. You will take the lead on supporting the Suffolk Health and Care System in learning from serious care reviews, providing strategic leadership, embedding key learning and ensuring best practice. You will work with partners to identify integration opportunities to enable more effective delivery of services within your portfolio. Your lead strategic role in adult safeguarding will ensure continuous improvement that will make adults at risk in Suffolk safer.

You will also work closely with County Councillors, the Corporate Leadership Team (CLT), and Health Leadership to develop and deliver the council's political and strategic agendas and to assume both individual responsibility for leading specific projects and programmes within these. You will work collaboratively with ASC Management Team to ensure services are delivered or commissioned flexibly for the benefit of individuals with social care needs and family carers.

System leadership will be an essential part of the role as integration with health and public sector partners, voluntary sector and care sector partners is they key components of transforming service delivery, ensuring health and social care systems are as integrated and effective as possible for service users.

As a leader, you will be expected to promote the county council's vision, objectives and priorities effectively to staff, partners and the public and inspire others by role modelling our organisational values at all times. You will promote a culture of fostering innovation, value for money and outcome-based customer focus.

You will work with your DMT colleagues in the development of a new delivery model to meet our transformation challenges, ensuring all business in your portfolio is aligned to this framework and you will take responsibility for the development of a Signs of Safety (SoS) practice culture within ASC, modelling SoS through your leadership approach.

In this role you'll be expected to deliver:

• A lead contribution to the creation of a high-performance culture within the ASC directorate that is flexible, innovative, responsive to changing priorities and empowers people to deliver excellence, best value, and continuous improvement for the people of Suffolk.

• The development of a highly effective, collaborative, and inspirational Management Team, demonstrating strong leadership for our staff and partners.

• Excellent leadership ensuring effective operations in planning, programme development, human resources and staff development, systems development, business development, and financial oversight.

• Effective system leadership, building trust and developing shared priorities with DMT members, partners and stakeholders, including tackling areas of conflict and creating solutions to ensure the delivery of user-focussed, integrated, locality based services for vulnerable adults and their families.

• Communicate agreed actions into service operations ensuring accountable leaders are clear on outcomes.

• Leadership of appropriate networks, boards, and individual stakeholder relationships across the local system in order to influence increased integration and collaborative working such as Integrated Care Partnership, Quality Assurance Boards, Social Care Research Governance Group.

• Joint working with other Directorates within the Council and key partners (e.g. ICBs) to turn agreed ambitions into delivery plans, ensuring controls and governance are in place to deliver outcomes.

• Collaborative, integrated outcome-based service planning that takes account of national performance standards, statutory and local performance plans and ensures the personalisation of social care services for adults is achieved.

• Embedding a learning culture within teams to develop high quality practice, innovative ways of working, model behaviours and effective use of Signs of Safety principles and tools.

• Leadership of the implementation of ways of working to support effective early help and prevention including identifying potential hazards to delivering effective services.

• Ensuring that all statutory services and operational obligations (e.g. Care Act, Mental Health Act and Mental Capacity Act) are fulfilled and delivered to agreed standards and quality frameworks.

• Contribution directly to the development, implementation and evaluation of the Suffolk and Norfolk teaching partnership working across Directorates to maintain a high profile for professional social work practice.

• Effective communication strategies for sharing the vision and plans with staff, partners and the public to ensure there is clear understanding.

• The monitoring and continuous review of directorate and county, strategies, local service delivery plans and priorities, to ensure delivery and that risks are managed and escalated appropriately

• A commercial approach to commissioning, service development and contracting functions within your area. Ensuring robust and comprehensive functions are delivered, working to new standards and reducing cost while maintaining good delivery of services and any services provided by voluntary, independent and private sector organisations represent value for money and are appropriately monitored against required service delivery standards to ensure they are fit for purpose.

• Financial management of the services budget (multi million pound) ensuring robust budget management is place throughout the teams with appropriate controls in place to ensure spending profiles are met whilst saving challenges are delivered.

• Lead savings plans for your service and ASC Transformation Programmes, ensuring that plans are in place across these areas with lead accountable budget owners established.

• Leadership of staff engagement for your service areas.

• Creating an environment which supports staff to embrace and role model the organisational WeASPIRE values.

• Strategic steer on programme management across ASC to ensure all work is system led, affordable, effective and in line with ASC, SCC, and system partner priorities.

• Cover for the Director of ASC with full accountability as and when required.

• Working collaboratively with providers, and other workforce, business and economic development teams, NHS commissioners and Providers, and District/ Borough councils and promoting innovative approaches to meeting social care needs.

• A co-productive approach to market and service development that engages effectively with citizens, customers, family carers, and their representatives through a range of methods and approaches, including making appropriate use of digital communication.

About the teams:

In this role, as part of ASC Directorate Management Team, as well as your leadership deliverables as set out above, you will work collegiately in support of the Director of Adult Social Care and your ASC Area/Assistant Director colleagues in delivering together the best possible services including social work, occupational therapy professionals, reablement services, mental health and learning disability services. You will be responsible for the following services in your portfolio.

• Adult Safeguarding and Adults Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (circa 33fte) - Led by the Head of Adult Safeguarding this service consists of a small Central Adult Safeguarding Team, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) Team, and an Adults Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) Team which is the front door of the service.

• Quality Assurance and Practice Development Team (circa 7fte) – Led by our Head of Quality Assurance this small team consists of our Principal Social Work Advisors as well as shared function with resources Children Services for the commissioning of training and education to support practice development and delivery including.

apprentices.

• CQC Programme Management – (circa 1fte) building on the work that was undertaken as part of the first CQC inspection pilot the programme manage will coordinate the services response and actions as we move towards our first form CQC inspection.

• Sensing Change (circa 18 fte) – Led by our Head of Sensing Change this service consisting of qualified, skilled and experienced professionals provide a specialist service to people with sight and/or hearing loss.

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