The challenge
Our client, a local authority in the north-west of England, approached Consultancy+, which is part of Reed Talent Solutions, for support with completing a backlog of 300 Best Interest Assessments (BIAs) and 300 Mental Health Assessments (MHAs) within a 10-month timescale.
The project involved sourcing a team of best interest assessors and section 12 doctors, as well as an additional pool of assessors which would be available as required.
The council was also struggling to ensure service users were seen for their Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) assessments within statutory timescales.
The solution
We set out to understand the unique challenge of the authority and designed a service and solution that would work for them. This meant deploying one of our project consultants to lead the project with a supporting team of four practitioners.
All the project consultants went through a vigorous compliance process and onboarding was managed internally to ensure a consistent approach. In line with workforce plans and demand fluctuations, we were able to increase this support by leaning on the wider pool of consultants that we were able to recruit.
This additional resource supplemented short-term demand while the core team of five offered consistency and understanding of the service users and the authority. The process was controlled and supported by one of our experienced delivery managers, our head of project management office (PMO) and one of our PMO analysts, who provided oversight and assurance across the delivery.
Our team of specialists managed the allocation process for the DoLS assessments, allowing our client to scale up and down on how many were allocated per month to reach the 300 total. This meant the authority was able to ensure signatories and business support were able to handle the volume of assessments being processed through the council. Throughout the process we were able to continually increase resource availability to achieve the project objectives.
A change management process was established in which it was agreed that if the quality or timeliness of an assessor’s work was deemed problematic by the council, we would provide an alternative assessor or assessors to enable the project to be delivered.
The results
The assessors and section 12 doctors were able to complete all 300 assessments within the allotted timescales. This resulted in the council extending the project and regularly utilising our services to manage assessment fluctuations.
Key benefits of the project included:
The timely completion of the assessments ensured service users and their families felt seen and supported by the council
By completing the assessments within the stipulated timescales, the project avoided any additional costs associated with delays
The assessments ensured that the rights of the service users were safeguarded
The local authority was able to maximise internal capacity to ensure a continual flow of assessments
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