CIC Big Change North West and Cheshire

North West

The Big Change The First Year of Our Journey North West & Cheshire

People Passion Potential

The Big Change – The First Year of Our Journey Central

2013-2017: A VISION

32

From CIC Group to

Forming

6 Regional Business Units

SCOTLAND NORTH EAST NORTH WEST x2

Care Award Nominations in 2013

CENTRAL

…to become The UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity

Big Change, Big Ambitions, Big Journey We told you one year ago that we’d be changing Community Integrated Care, to transform our charity and move to a better place. We didn't say that change would be quick or easy – we knew that there would be many difficult challenges and choices along the way – but we’ve tried to do what is right for the Community Integrated Care family.

We hope that you have noticed some positive improvements this year, both large and small, and feel inspired by our priorities for the year ahead.

The Big Change is a long journey that will require the support of everyone in our charity – we hope that you will back us along the way.

SOUTH

£382,000

2009-2012 NO GROWTH

The Big Change The First Year of Our Journey Central

Since The Big Change

£8,000,000 IN NEW CONTRACTS

CUTTING THROUGH

Share your thoughts, email us at:

thebigchange@c-i-c.co.uk

RED-TAPE

by simplifying our processes People Passion Potential

SUPPORTING 600 MORE PEOPLE

Through winning new contracts

1.8 £ MILLION

In growth through local enquiries from public and professionals

SAVED By negotiating with suppliers

2013 Working in

50

Local authorities 2012 Working in 42 Local authorities

£X million

£1.9

MILLION INVESTED

INTRODUCED KEY ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

in improving our properties

Deregistration in every region

Priority Projects

Dear Colleagues,

2 Service User Voice

1 Personalisation and Support Planning Getting better at supporting people.

Building better relationships between the people we support, our staff and the communities we work in.

Making inclusion ‘who we are and what we do’.

Listening and responding to the people we support.

Putting the person at the centre of all we do.

Martin McGuigan, Regional Director

Giving the people we support influence at a local, regional and national level.

Service Improvement Driving up quality.

But sometimes, when there is so much happening, it’s easy to forget to stop and take stock of the results of our hard work – and that is what this special publication is all about.

Over the following pages you will read about everything that together, we – as colleagues,

as regions, and as an organisation - have achieved since the start of our Big Change journey. You will see for yourselves how much things have changed and how much we have shaped our charity for the better. Perhaps most important of all, you will also find out more about the roadmap for the rest of our journey… to becoming The UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity by 2017.

But first, let’s start by taking a look at the progress that we in the Central region have made in achieving our new strategy, through great teamwork and sharing an ambitious vision.

Our Region’s Key Achievements

3

Delivering genuinely leading services.

There’s no doubt that the past 12 months have seen some really big changes within our organisation, not least the return to our full name – Community Integrated Care!

Working with and learning from care sector experts.

Customer Focus Provider of choice: By building better relationships with commissioners, we've secured two Extra Care services in Kirklees and several learning disability services across Greater Manchester.

One-page profiles: We’ve introduced these to really get to know the people we support and how they want to be supported.

Improved environments: By partnering with Landlords and Councils, as well as making our own investments, we have enhanced the environment in many of our services.

Income Growth New business: We now support 200 more people and have opened 14 new services.

This has seen our income increase by £2.6m.

Value for Money Agency staff: Our region’s spend on agency staff has reduced by a massive 45%.

Deregistration: Six Leeds services have been deregistered, saving Commissioners £150k p.a.

Profile Awards: We had five colleagues shortlisted for national care awards, with many more recognised at regional events.

Skills for Care: We’re featuring in a video for Skills for Care, raising awareness of careers in adult social care.

Conferences: Our region has exhibited at a number of prestigious social care conferences.

Workforce Employing in communities: We find candidates who understand their local area, so they can help the people we support to get involved in the community.

Staffing: We now have full staff teams in areas where we were once very short-staffed.

Regional Manager of the Year! Adam Wells’ honour at our 25th Anniversary Awards has created a real buzz in our region.

Quality Standards Mentoring: Team Leaders are encouraged to coach and mentor support staff when possible, to get the very best out of them.

Service User Voice Naturally, a really massive part of being genuinely person-centered, is about making sure that those people at the centre, the people we support, can tell us what they think about everything we do as an organisation. It’s our job to then listen and be ready to act.

We’ve already started some good work with our regional social inclusion groups, like 'Step Up To Life' and 'Branches' but we need to do more to make sure that everyone we support has the opportunity to influence all levels of Community Integrated Care – locally, regionally and nationally.

Our Regional Director for the North West & Cheshire, Jill Lucock, is leading on this project and we know that it’s an issue that is close to lots of your hearts, so make sure you get in touch with Jill and tell her what you think at: jill.lucock@c-i-c.co.uk

Service Improvement Everything about the Big Change programme is to try and help Community Integrated Care move from being a good organisation, to a great one. And driving up the quality of the services we deliver, so that they meet our customers’ expectations, is a huge part of this.

What we learn from our Personalisation and Service User Voice projects will impact on service quality massively. We will also work with leading, respected figures in our sector, so we can learn from their knowledge and expertise too.

Gill Bruton, Regional Director for North West & Cumbria is in charge of this project, so you will be hearing more from her about this, but if you want to get in touch with her to find out more, drop her line at: gill.bruton@c-i-c.co.uk

Dear Colleagues,

Jill Lucock, Regional Director

There’s no doubt that the past 12 months have seen some really big changes within our organisation, not least the return to our full name – Community Integrated Care!

But sometimes, when there is so much happening, it’s easy to forget to stop and take stock of the results of our hard work – and that is what this special publication is all about.

Over the following pages you will read about everything that together, we – as colleagues,

as regions, and as an organisation - have achieved since the start of our Big Change journey. You will see for yourselves how much things have changed and how much we have shaped our charity for the better. Perhaps most important of all, you will also find out more about the roadmap for the rest of our journey… to becoming The UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity by 2017.

But first, let’s start by taking a look at the progress that we in the North West & Cheshire region have made in achieving our new strategy, through great teamwork and sharing an ambitious vision.

Our Region’s Key Achievements Culture Change Regional Strategy Events: These were vibrant and engaging, with lots of positive feedback.

Big Champions: We elected Big Change champions in all services, helping make sure all services understand our future ambitions.

Becoming a Regional Business Unit: We've built a close relationship with our regional Business Partners, who are a big part of our team.

Customer Focus Greater Clarity: Commissioners have told us our new structures are clearer and it’s now easier to build relationships with us.

Service User Involvement: The Circle Theatre Group will be putting a new production on in April and ‘Branches’, our North West Social Inclusion Group, are planning their own Big Change social event in May.

Profile Awards: Our region experienced great success in a variety of awards in 2013. At the Great North West Care Awards, our region scooped the prestigious honour of the ‘Dignity in Care’ Award, and at the National Care Awards we took home the Special Needs Manager Award.

Region of the Year! We had the huge honour of being named Region of the Year at the our 25th Anniversary Awards.

Workforce Proud of our Charity: Home Managers now feel this is an organisation they want to work for and feel proud of.

New Opportunities: Our new relationship with Riverside College has created training opportunities for staff and volunteers.

Income Growth New contracts: Improved commissioner relationships have helped us secure over £4million of new business!

New territory: Our new relationships have helped us win business in different locations.

The Big Change – A Year On Just over a year ago, we told you that we were at a pivotal moment in Community Integrated Care’s history: one where we either transformed our organisation and aimed to thrive, or faced stagnation and struggled to survive. So, we charted a path to becoming a better, more successful organisation and we called this The Big Change.

Over the course of the past year, we’ve been working hard at putting our new plan into action and our journey to becoming a better, more successful charity, has already seen some great results. In this publication, we want to show you how far we have come in just one year and tell you all about our ambitious plans for the next 12 months…

The Beginnings of the Big Change In early 2012, Community Integrated Care’s Chief Executive, Neil Matthewman, and our Executive Team, embarked on creating a new five year strategy for our charity. It was clear that this strategy needed to respond to many difficult challenges, as our organisation had begun to lose pace with many of our competitors, in lots of different ways.

To support the development of these plans, they asked leading social care consultants, Cordis Bright, to undertake the biggest independent research project of our history.

Their research identified several key issues – a lack of growth, some old fashioned services and inefficient ways of working – but it also gave us some clear direction on how to set things right.

This research became the bedrock of our Big Change programme and helped us to produce an ambitious new strategy, which has the aim of becoming The UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity.

A Year of Big Changes So, what were the problems a year ago and what’s changed?

Structure and Names Cordis Bright identified that Community Integrated Care’s management structure just wasn’t working. It was clear that this was at the root of many of our problems.

Prior to The Big Change, Community Integrated Care was separated into two divisions, ‘Senior Care’ and ‘Independent Living’. This artificial separation meant that our senior managers only worked for one of these divisions and so were only able to sell or promote their own division. As a result,

A New Structure

SCOTLAND

in many areas of the country, we were only giving people half of the picture on what our organisation could offer and we were missing out on some big opportunities to grow.

But more so, the outside world didn’t know what ‘Senior Care’ or ‘Independent Living’ meant. We’d created descriptions that no one else in the care sector used, which confused people about who we were and what we could do.

At the end of 2012, Community Integrated Care moved away from ‘Senior Care’ and ‘Independent Living’, to a new regional approach to management. This saw us create Regional Business Units for each of the key regions we work in: • Scotland

NORTH EAST

• North East England • North West & Cumbria

NORTH WEST LIVERPOOL, SEFTON, CUMBRIA & LANCASHIRE

CENTRAL

• North West & Cheshire • Central England • The South

NORTH WEST CHESHIRE, WIGAN & SOUTH MERSEYSIDE

SOUTH

These business units have transformed the way in which we work, ensuring that many key decisions are now made locally.

Our regional business units are guided by a Regional Director and supported by a team of Regional Managers. Together, they oversee all of our services in their local area.

The Business Units are also given dedicated support from colleagues in key departments, like Finance, HR, Property, Quality and Learning and Development.

One year in and we can already see the impact of this local approach. Our new regional teams have quickly established themselves, working collaboratively and focussing on key local priorities. We have received lots of feedback from staff that this emphasis on local ownership and accountability is already paying off, allowing us to become a more flexible and responsive organisation.

From Static Structure to Great Growth!

In 2013, our region secured a significant contract from the charity Seashell Trust, to deliver a new type of service for Community Integrated Care – specialist support for people with learning disabilities and hearing impairments. We were chosen by the Trust to be the provider who would take on their Stockport-based services for young adults. As a result, we now support 12 people at a specialist residential service and four people in their own tenancy.

This has been a brilliant project for our North West and Cheshire Region. It has seen us learn from the expertise of another provider, involve colleagues from across our region and support services, and encourage lots of people to sign up for training in communicating with hearing impaired people – delivered by our own Regional Manager, David Gillies.

This is a great example of how, in response to the ‘Big Change’, we have been ambitious and worked together to make a big difference to people’s lives.

Returning to Community Integrated Care Another key aim of our Big Change programme was to become better known for what we do. We recognised that our brand name of ‘CIC Group’ felt a bit anonymous and didn’t give people a proper sense of what we are all about.

So, last year we set about returning to the name of Community Integrated Care – a name that has much more meaning – and developing a stronger brand identity.

Our Communications and Marketing team worked closely with people from all levels of our organisation on this project.

They listened to people’s experiences of being part of our charity and their perspectives on what makes us unique, and used this to plan our new look.

In December 2013, Community Integrated Care was rebranded with a bold, modern new style. This new brand identity focuses on three key words that our community feel really describe our charity:

People Passion Potential

Your Rebrand Reflections “This rebrand looks ace!”

“It’s fantastic to have our name in full. It will make a difference in promoting that the Big Change is real.”

Support in the Community

People Passion Potential

“ T he three P ’s – People, Passion, Potential – are great!”

Support at Home

People Passion Potential

Sample Name Company Position

dd: 0123 456 7899 eml: sample.name@c-i-c.co.uk

Old Market Court, Miners Way, Widnes, Cheshire, WA8 7SP. 0151 420 3637 information@c-i-c.co.uk www.c-i-c.co.uk

“ I love the new branding and literature - it is fantastic to have something tangible to showcase our services. The new strapline also gives everyone a clear idea of our purpose and values - love it!

We Are Community Integrated Care Community Integrated Care is one of the UK’s largest and most successful health and social care charities.

For over a quarter of a century we have worked at the forefront of the care sector, helping people with care and support needs to lead full and happy lives.

We work in the community, delivering life-enhancing services to people of all ages, with a diverse range of needs, including: • Learning disabilities • Mental health concerns • Autism • Age-related needs • Dementia

SCOTLAND

We Care With Passion NORTH EAST

NORTH WEST

CENTRAL

LIVERPOOL, SEFTON, CUMBRIA & LANCASHIRE

Community Integrated Care was founded in 1988, with the aim of supporting people leaving long-stay, institutional

NORTH

hospitals to lead fuller, better lives in the community.

WEST

CHESHIRE, WIGAN & We were SOUTH MERSEYSIDE

one of the pioneers of ‘care in the community’,

believing that having support needs should not be a barrier to living with independence and choice, and we have always

“Every day is different and fun!”

kept these values at our heart.

Our charity has grown to deliver a wide range of innovative and bespoke services to thousands of people. With our broad mix of experience and specialist skills, we have the ability, insight and resources to deliver exceptional services.

SOUTH

We Are A National Charity Community Integrated Care delivers services from

“I like doing the things I love, with the people important to me.”

Scotland, right down to the foot of England.

We focus on working locally, understanding the

At Community Integrated Care we believe that good support

special of each means enabling people tocharacteristics achieve their fullest potential, by

community we deliver

continually promoting their independence. To achieve this, we

services in. To do this, we have structured our

Kerry, Tenant at Dodman Road

focus on delivering ‘person-centred support’. This means that every person isorganisation provided with a personalised that is into sixservice regional

divisions, which each

right for them as an individual – fulfilling their needs, interests

have the resources, specialist skills and support to

and aspirations.

deliver services We enjoy working in close excellent collaboration with health and in

In doing so, we are able to deliver services that holistically meet the care and support needs of the people we support.

We Believe In Potential

our local communities.

social care professionals, such as commissioners, social work professionals and GPs, sharing our mutual expertise and skills.

Matthew, Supported at Vocational Support Service greatest possible difference to society and the people

Our Values

we support. We were founded with a clear vision that

Our ambitious and

Community Integrated Care strives to make the

having a disability should not mean exclusion from

uncompromising attitude

opportunity, dignity and equality. This same passion

is reflected in our

charity today.

which are the five key

and commitment remains at the very core of our People Passion Potential

We believe in aiming for the exceptional, by always focussing on improvement and thinking big. In recognition of this, the vision of Community Integrated Care is to become the UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity.

organisational values, characteristics that we always endeavour to uphold: – WE RESPECT individual choice and promote inclusion, rights and independence.

People Passion Potential

– WE ENABLE individuals to meet their needs and fulfil their aspirations.

– WE ASPIRE to be the best at what we do.

– WE DELIVER the best possible outcomes for the people we support and the partners we work with.

– WE INCLUDE the people we support, our staff, the communities we work in and our partners.

People Passion Potential

Building our Brand

✪

In 2013, we received significant attention and recognition for our good work. We’ve been shortlisted for more than 30 care sector awards, featured in local newspapers and national media – like The Guardian and Telegraph, and presented at some of the care sector’s biggest conferences!

Growth Before the Big Change, Community Integrated Care hadn’t grown for more than three years.

At the same time that we were stagnating, many of our competitors had experienced significant growth – winning big contracts and supporting many more people. We needed to turn this around, and quickly.

£m 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

2011 2010 COMMUNITY INTEGRATED CARE

Growth – Turning Ambition into Reality Our new Five Year Strategy recognises that if we successfully achieve the ambitions of our Big Change programme, we’ll be able to grow. In fact, we’ve set a target of growing by 30% by 2017.

We are already seeing some dramatic success. Since launching the Big Change, we’ve secured contracts for new services that will bring almost £8 million of new income.

This has meant that we are now supporting more than 600 new people.

As a result of becoming a more responsive, locally-focussed organisation, we have also generated around £1.8 million worth of new business through direct enquiries from the public and professionals. This demonstrates the ambitious work of our regional management teams and frontline services to build better relationships and improve our reputation.

£m

CREATIVE SUPPORT

ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

COMMUNITY INTEGRATED CARE TURNOVER

102

£100m

100 98 96 94 92

Heading in the right direction

£93m

90 88 86

2010-11

2011-12

2012-13

2013-14

Turnover

This growth means that Community Integrated Care is in a more stable place than we were before the Big Change.

But more so, this means that we are able to assist even more people, make a greater impact on local communities and offer more opportunities to our staff.

2013

2012 Working in 42 Local authorities

Working in

50

Local authorities

Working Practice As part of their research project, Cordis Bright consulted with our senior managers to get a clearer understanding of their workloads.

Their feedback said that they were often too busy reacting to operational issues and offering support to frontline services, to build relationships with vital partners like commissioners and housing providers.

The Big Change has focussed on freeing our organisation up from unnecessary bureaucracy and empowering frontline staff to make their own choices. By allowing appropriate decisions to be made at a service level, our Regional Managers now have more time to look outwardly.

Our regional teams have really seized the opportunity to build better professional relationships. All across the country, we are seeing the fruits of better partnership work between our teams and vital agencies like

commissioners, social work teams, housing providers and carer groups.

We’ve also been more active than ever in attending local and national care sector conferences, where we have both shared our own best practice in presentations and learned from the innovations of others.

We know that there is more that we can do to reduce bureaucracy and improve working practice. We’d welcome your feedback on what our priority areas to focus on next should be.

We exhibited and spoke at Great British Care Show events across the country.

Innovation One of the major ambitions of the Big Change and our Five Year Strategy is to become a more modern and creative organisation. We have looked at new ways to enhance the independence of the people we support and to help them to achieve the best lives possible. This is a long-term effort, but one year in we have already achieved some great successes.

Perhaps our most significant achievement is the fact that we have deregistered many of our registered services in all of our regions.

This has enabled the people we support

to become tenants in their own homes and have greater choice over how they want to lead their lives.

Refurbishing tired properties has been another key priority too – since launching The Big Change, we’ve spent nearly £2million on our services across the UK, making them safer, more accessible and more comfortable. We’ve also targeted underperforming landlords who have neglected the properties they provide to the people we support, encouraging them to make the necessary improvements.

But it wasn’t all about changing the things Cordis Bright told us were wrong… we’ve been working on the things you told us needed changing too.

When we first came up with The Big Change, one of the most important steps for us was to tell each of you about our plans.

Yes, the Cordis Bright research had given us a better sense of where we were as an organisation, but we really needed to hear your thoughts too – after all, you are the ones at the frontline of what we do.

So, we shared our plans in lots of different ways – information booklets, DVDs, on our intranet, in our newsletter, as well regional roadshows. We wanted to encourage as many of you as possible to let us know your thoughts…and you certainly did!

We were overwhelmed by the amount of feedback we received – texts, emails, postcards… You clearly had lots to say!

Many of you were really excited to hear about our new ambitions – you too felt that we had become slightly stale and out-dated; lots of you also wanted more information about how we saw our plans making your service a better place to live and work.

But throughout all of your feedback, there were certain issues that kept coming up again and again: Pay, Training and Recruitment.

Regional Roadshows

We held events in every region, where colleagues of all levels could share their views with our Regional Directors, Executive Team and Trustees.

So, what have we done?…

We heard loud and clear that these were important concerns to you and we had to do something about them.

But more fundamentally, we also recognised that these concerns represented an even bigger issue; if we weren’t getting these basics right, how could we be the great employer that aimed to be? At the heart of our new strategy is an aim to deliver leading services, but this has to mean that we become a leading employer too.

So, we decided to take a fresh approach and we brought on board Elaine Gilbert as Director of Organisational Development and Transformation.

Big title right? But what does it mean?!

Well, some companies have a HR function that just looks after the day-to-day, more process-led elements of employing lots of people – providing advice on policies and processing paperwork – and this is kind of how we were set up too. Of course, this is all essential work which needs to be done, but it misses a really important part of HR too – organisational development.

First step…

Elaine has set a vision for our Organisational Development Strategy: "As Community Integrated Care grows, we will create an environment that allows our 'people' to thrive. We will harness the 'passion' of our staff and invest in their skills, so that we can enable the people we support to safely fulfil their greatest 'potential'."

One of the first steps to achieving this is to create a HR team with a much wider remit, so that they are responsible for things like Reward & Recognition, Workforce Planning, Recruitment, Culture Change, Learning & Development (L&D) and Talent Management. These are all activities which need to be central to our organisation, if we are going to achieve a culture where our staff feel properly valued and rewarded.

So, as from 1st April, Elaine will be making some structural changes to her team which should help us achieve our aim for a refreshed approach to HR. The main differences will be: • The creation of new HR/Organisational Development Business Partner roles, based in each region and partnering your Regional Director and Regional Managers. These new roles will replace, and be very different to, our current HR Business Partner roles. Whilst they will still offer you support with HR issues, importantly, they will also create ‘People’ strategies for your region, taking into consideration all of the activities listed above and reflecting the specific landscape of your area of the country.

Essentially, we want to move away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to HR. • Additional resource in Learning & Development and Talent Management, which will give more direction to our overall approach to L&D, and how we support our L&D Business Partners to meet the training needs of each region moving forward.

• A dedicated ‘Transitions’ team, which will help us make the changes that are necessary to our existing practices, policies and procedures. This team will be in place during 2014.

• A small ‘Projects’ team which can offer more concentrated support on HR related projects, hopefully freeing up the time of your Regional Managers.

We believe that this will provide you with a much more effective, responsive and flexible HR function, better equipped to support Community Integrated Care to achieve its ambitious growth plans.

Elaine says: “To deliver the very best services, we must have the right people and culture in place, so that we can genuinely transform Community Integrated Care and achieve our vision of becoming the UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity. I am proud to be working with an organisation at the inception of such an aspirational journey and am committed to harnessing the passion and potential of our employees to create an organisation where people genuinely feel proud to work.”

You can contact Elaine at: elaine.gilbert@c-i-c.co.uk

So, now you know what Elaine’s role is, let’s look at what steps have already been taken to help us address your issues…

Pay

£

By far the most amount of feedback we received related to pay.

But, whilst pay was the overall theme, it actually covered lots of different issues, including concerns about our payroll function, pay rates and general reward and recognition – so let’s tackle these in order…

Getting paid

Pay rates

We were really concerned to hear stories about people not being paid the right amounts, at the right times, as well as not receiving enough support with payroll questions.

We know that this is a hugely important topic to you and with over 70% of annual income spent on staff costs, it’s a really important issue for us too.

It goes without saying that making sure you are paid properly for the work you do is an absolute necessity, and so we knew we had to fix this problem straight away. Our Finance Director, Mark D'Arcy, took the lead on this important project.

Mark took a good look at the payroll team and structure we had in place and decided to radically change our approach. We now have a whole new payroll team in place, with a brand new Payroll Manager, and a dedicated Payroll Business Partner responsible for each region.

We hope these changes show you how committed we are to really listening to what you say and acting upon your concerns. We hope too, that these changes really start to have a positive effect soon and we look forward to hearing your feedback on this.

Like many other businesses in our sector, pay is an issue for which we face huge constraints. In comparison to other sectors, the care industry does not attract high salaries, particularly for organisations like ours, who are funded in the main by local authorities at a time of cuts in public spending.

Whilst we can’t promise higher salaries, what we can do, is make a firm commitment to always acting in an ethical way and striving to ensure that you are paid fairly for our industry. This year, one of Elaine’s main tasks will be to conduct a comprehensive review of our terms and conditions, creating a structure that is fair to all staff. We’ll come back to you soon to tell you more about this.

Reward and Recognition A big part of the issue around pay is looking at how, within the financial constraints we face, we can come up with new and creative ways to give you more for your hard work.

So, for example, this year, to thank you for helping us reach our 25th Anniversary milestone, we arranged for every service to throw a mini-birthday celebration, as well as giving each and every one of our staff an extra ½ day of annual leave and a £25 Love to Shop Voucher! We know these may only seem like little things, but hopefully, they do all add up and show that we will do what we can to give you more.

We have lots of other initiatives too, all aimed at rewarding your hard work and commitment:• Our Employee Discount Scheme, which has been improved and enhanced last year.

• Childcare Vouchers • Employee Assistance Programme Most importantly, in the coming year, one of Elaine’s big projects will be to look at how we reward and recognise you all and create a fresh new strategy, which will hopefully contain lots for you to be excited about!

Training Following your feedback, we set about taking a really in-depth look at our training offering - to see what we were doing well, but more importantly, where things could be improved. As a result, our training team have seen some significant changes over the past 12 months: • The Team now has a new name: the Learning & Development Department.

• Each of our 6 regions now has its own dedicated Learning & Development Business Partner – helping deliver much more regionallyfocussed training solutions.

• We’ve introduced more regional admin support, helping ensure that the right people, attend the right training, at the right time!

As well as refreshing the team’s structure, there are lots of other things happening too: • The introduction of the Common Induction Standards (CIS) Assessment Tool – an online programme which assesses your training needs, and helps to make sure you only attend training which is new and relevant to you.

• A new corporate induction programme, helping all new staff understand the standards and values we expect.

• Both E-learning and our management development programme will be reviewed and enhanced during 2015.

We’ve also pledged our support for the ‘Social Care Commitment’ – a new initiative led by Skills for Care – which means that we have publically promised to develop the skills and knowledge of our workforce, so that our sector delivers quality care, by quality people. Training for such a large organisation like Community Integrated Care will always be a complex issue, but we hope you can see that we are committed to getting things right for you. We promise to keep training as one of our top priorities and always review how we are doing things, to refine and develop our approach.

Recruitment Although not everyone is responsible for recruiting new staff, we know that you all feel the effects of a service being understaffed, either because of the pressures that using agency staff can create (not to mention the huge costs) or having to cover extra shifts yourself, to keep your service running safely.

We understand the importance of having full staff teams: it affects the quality of the support we provide, as well as making your

working life better by allowing you to feel part of a close-knit and supportive staff ‘family’.

Because it’s such a big issue for us, we have decided to bring in a specialist in recruitment to really look into the problems we face, and give us the best solutions to overcome these. Within the next few months, we will be able to come back to you with more concrete plans about how we will improve recruitment across the organisation.

We learnt by listening….

Sharing our plans, getting out and meeting so many of you, and really listening to what you had to say, reminded us of something that sometimes, big companies like ours can forget:

We can learn so much by really listening to you our frontline staff.

Looking at the way your feedback has genuinely helped us shape our plans for the better, has truly inspired us to take a fresh new look at how we approach internal communications within our organisation.

Over the next few months we will be working on a brand new internal communications plan for Community Integrated Care – the starting point of which will be to speak to as many of you as

possible, finding out about the things you need and want to know, how you like to be communicated with and how you don’t, as well as the tools and channels you like to use to make sure your voice is heard.

Hopefully, this work will allow us to make some genuine strides forward in making you all feel more included and engaged with life here at Community Integrated Care.

MAKE SURE YOUR VOICE IS HEARD

But it doesn’t stop there!

We’ve set ourselves a big target – TO BECOME

the UK’s Leading Health and Social Care Charity by 2017 and we still have plenty to do over the next 4 years to get us there…

But, we can’t do everything all at once! We have to prioritise the most important things for us to work on… but with so much to do, how do we decide where to start!?

Between them, our managers came up with a list of ‘Big Ticket’ projects for us to concentrate on this year, and in the years to come. This was a true democratic process, where our people decided upon the priorities for our charity.

Well, in March last year we took all of our senior managers away for two days in York. We got everyone together in one room and asked “What do you think are the most important things for Community Integrated Care to change next?”

Since we can’t do everything all at once, we’re going to concentrate on the issues that came top of the list and then work our way down – kind of makes sense doesn’t it!?

So here are the TOP THREE projects we’re going to focus on for now, and which we think are the building blocks of all the other projects to follow…

The Priority Projects Personalisation & Support Planning The people we support are the reason why our organisation exists.

So it makes sense that right at the top of our list is the project that first and foremost, will look at how we can get better at supporting people, as well as becoming more personalised in building relationships with our staff and the communities that we work in.

We know that ‘personalisation’ means lots of different things, to lots of different people, but for us, we think it means is putting the person we support at the centre of everything we do – whether that’s in our services, or across our organisation as a whole. We want true ‘person-centredness’ to become second nature to us all, so that it just becomes “the way we do things around here”.

But where do we start?

Well, first off we need to look at where we are now, and where we want to get to – we know that some organisations are doing a really great job of being really person-centred and we want to be right up there with them; so then we need to plan how we are going to get there. This is what the first phase of the project will look at.

As part of this, we’ll also need to agree a common understanding of what a really a personalised way of working looks like, so that all of us know what is expected of us. So we’ll look at this too.

We think this first stage will be all wrapped up by 1st June 2014 and our Regional Director for Central, Martin McGuigan, will come back to you then with an update. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or feedback you want to share with him, he’d love to hear from you.

You can email him at: martin.mcguigan@c-i-c.co.uk

Service User Voice Naturally, a really massive part of being genuinely person-centered, is about making sure that those people at the centre, the people we support, can tell us what they think about everything we do as an organisation. It’s our job to then listen and be ready to act.

We’ve already started some good work with our regional social inclusion groups, like 'Step Up To Life' and 'Branches' but we need to do more to make sure that everyone we support has the opportunity to influence all levels of Community Integrated Care – locally, regionally and nationally.

Our Regional Director for the North West & Cheshire, Jill Lucock, is leading on this project and we know that it’s an issue that is close to lots of your hearts, so make sure you get in touch with Jill and tell her what you think at: jill.lucock@c-i-c.co.uk

Service Improvement Everything about the Big Change programme is to try and help Community Integrated Care move from being a good organisation, to a great one. And driving up the quality of the services we deliver, so that they meet our customers’ expectations, is a huge part of this.

What we learn from our Personalisation and Service User Voice projects will impact on service quality massively. We will also work with leading, respected figures in our sector, so we can learn from their knowledge and expertise too.

Gill Bruton, Regional Director for North West & Cumbria is in charge of this project, so you will be hearing more from her about this, but if you want to get in touch with her to find out more, drop her line at: gill.bruton@c-i-c.co.uk

Big Change, Big Ambitions, Big Journey We told you one year ago that we’d be changing Community Integrated Care, to transform our charity and move to a better place. We didn't say that change would be quick or easy – we knew that there would be many difficult challenges and choices along the way – but we’ve tried to do what is right for the Community Integrated Care family.

We hope that you have noticed some positive improvements this year, both large and small, and feel inspired by our priorities for the year ahead.

The Big Change is a long journey that will require the support of everyone in our charity – we hope that you will back us along the way.

Share your thoughts, email us at:

thebigchange@c-i-c.co.uk