Boost for social care commissioners as new training is launched

Scotland Excel has successfully launched an innovative series of learning sessions for the country’s public sector social care commissioning teams.

Professor Patricia Finlay from the University of Strathclyde, and co-chair of the Fair Work Convention, hosted the first of three sessions in Glasgow recently, where she spoke to delegates about fair work practices in the social care sector.

The free of charge sessions are being delivered as part of Scotland Excel’s commitment to provide opportunities for those working in a commissioning role at councils and Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs), to develop their knowledge and skills.

Julie Welsh, Chief Executive of Scotland Excel, said: “Social care commissioning plays an important part in making sure essential care services are delivered in a way that promotes wellbeing, choice and positive outcomes for people in their communities.

“Scotland Excel has overseen a portfolio of social care frameworks for over a decade and we work closely with commissioners to provide access to a range of services through our frameworks, which meet the individual needs of those who use them. We believe its hugely important to build and develop the knowledge base that exists within social care commissioning.

“I would like to thank Professor Finlay for joining us to deliver our first session where delegates learned about fair work practices at both national and local level and about how commissioning provides an important opportunity to embed fair work further in Scotland.

“She provided great insight into the fair work framework and the role of commissioning practices in ensuring that fair work drives a high quality service delivery. I look forward to the next two sessions.”

Session two will take place online online and is currently being finalised. We'll publish the date soon. It will focus on modern slavery and will be led by Steven Bertram, Detective Superintendent, Police Scotland.

During the session participants will have the opportunity to:
• Hear about the current trends in labour exploitation.
• Consider the visibility and recruitment of the workforce and the intelligence gaps where there are intelligence gap, visibility, and recruitment of the workforce.
• Increase awareness of methods of reporting concerns to Police Scotland
• Understand the role of a commissioner in monitoring and reporting, risk, audit, and compliance.

Delegate feedback

Speaking after the first session, Pauline Reid, Senior Planning Officer from Angus Health and Social Care Partnership, said: “I really enjoy attending workshops organised by Scotland Excel, as they bring together commissioners from other local authority areas which gives us the opportunity to discuss the challenges, share information and learn from each other. It was also quite nice to see people who I haven’t seen in person for a long time.

“Although I had an understanding of fair work practices before attending, Professor Findlay’s presentation was really eye-opening! What I took away from the session was that to enable providers to be able to adopt Fair Work practices for their staff, we as commissioners need to ensure that our commissioning approaches reduce the barriers to this happening.”

Rebecca Scott, Procurement Category Manager (People & Projects) at Dumfries and Galloway Council, who also attended, said: “From attending this event, I really benefitted from hearing different experiences across councils and Health and Social Care Partnerships in Scotland.

"I find it invaluable to get into a room with other commissioners and procurement colleagues to discuss the great things we are all doing. But also to discuss the challenging aspects of being able to implement fair work across contracts and monitoring these effectively, while being able to share best practice and learn from each other.”