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Chapter 2 Context
Introduction
The inspection of Glasgow City council social work services took place between June 2006 and February 2007 carried out by a team of SWIA inspectors, a lay inspector, a carer inspector, sessional inspectors and associate inspectors (managers from other local authorities and the NHS). During that time the team read a wide selection of material about the local authority and the social work service that it provided or commissioned. The team members analysed questionnaires received from staff, carers, people who used services and partners and stakeholders. Team members, together with some social work staff from Glasgow City, spent four days examining case files.
During the fieldwork, the team spoke to people who used services and their carers and to people who were responsible for delivering or arranging services. They met representatives from a range of organisations and groups as well as elected members and other stakeholders and visited places where social work provided services.
This report is not a detailed description of all the social work services in Glasgow City. It gives an overview and concentrates on good work the services were doing with people who needed assistance and the areas where the services needed to make improvements. It does not duplicate the inspection of services that the Care Commission regulates.
Area Profile
Glasgow faces the biggest social and economic challenges of any authority in Scotland:
- The city has both the largest population and is the most densely populated of the 32 authorities;
- It has higher rates of lung cancer, coronary heart disease and respiratory disease than the rest of Scotland and the UK. 25.6% of people have a limiting long term illness, 12.4% of adults are permanently sick or disabled and 10% of the Glasgow population provide unpaid care;
- The rate of drug misuse in the city (3.9%) is well above the national average (2%);
- Although the number of jobs in Glasgow increased by 20% between 1997 and 2004 (compared to a national increase of 15%), the employment rate in the city (66%) remains significantly lower than the national average of 75%. Median earnings are 4% lower than those for Scotland as a whole;
- Although the claimant count unemployment rate has decreased since 1999 the long term claimant count unemployment has risen faster; and
- Glasgow has 42 out of 50 of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland.
These high rates of poverty and deprivation have led to high levels of demand for services.
Political structure
In the summer of 2006 the council re-organised its decision-making structure. An executive committee became the council's principal decision-making body, supported by policy development and scrutiny committees covering each service area.
Organisation of social work services
In April 2006 social work services re-organised locality services into five community health and care partnerships ( CHCPs) in partnership with NHS Glasgow and Clyde ( NHSGGC). CHCP directors reported to both the NHS chief executive and the social work director. Senior management teams in CHCPs consisted of a mix of social work and NHSGGC employees. There was a requirement for some posts to be held by social work employees. This included heads of children's services who also needed to be qualified social workers. These posts had lead officer responsibility for social work services in each CHCP. CHCPs delivered most social work services.
Some tasks were centralised. At the centre were heads of service with strategic responsibility for each care group. Operational responsibility for some services such as residential provision and specialist resources also remained at the centre though plans were in place to transfer many of these incrementally.
The chief social work officer role lay with the head of performance - below the level of depute director but above that of other heads of service.
Appendices 2 and 3 contain diagrams of the services' structure.
Staffing
Social work services employed around 6,000 staff and commissioned homecare services from the council's direct and care services ( DACS).
In January 2004 the services set up the practice team model - teams of (around four) qualified workers/care managers and social care workers led by a practice team leader ( PTL) who had overall case-holding responsibility and was required to deploy staff resources within the team to manage these cases.
Criminal justice social work services
SWIA originally inspected Glasgow's criminal justice social work services as part of a separate national programme of inspections in 2004. We were concerned that the services had made little progress in addressing the recommendations in that report and in March 2006 revisited Glasgow to take a closer look at what it had achieved. We found several areas for improvement, some more serious than we had found in 2004. SWIA therefore carried out a further inspection of criminal justice social work services as part of this performance inspection. Appendix 1 outlines the findings of this follow-up inspection.
Inspection methodology and process
The structure of this report is based on the SWIA performance inspection model, which asks six key questions of the social work service:
1. What key outcomes have we achieved?
2. What impact have we had on people who use our services and other stakeholders?
3. How good is the delivery of our key processes?
4. How good is our management?
5. How good is our leadership?
6. What is our capacity for improvement?
The following chapters address each of these questions in turn.
We include a more detailed description of the inspection methodology and the way in which we carried out our inspection in appendix 4.
Figure 1: Map of Glasgow
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