Case Studies
In 2022, the adult social care (ASC) team at City of Wolverhampton Council developed a new vision and reviewed how services were being delivered. The ambition was to deliver a bold redesign that would bring financial sustainability and improved outcomes for residents.
The ASC leadership team knew this required cultural and behavioural change. IMPOWER worked with the council to reframe its ambition and identify opportunities to work differently, using our four-stage Theory of Change to identify, mobilise and embed interventions to deliver better outcomes for people that cost less.
Our initial discovery project identified opportunities and designed a transformation plan for ASC redesign in Wolverhampton. This included examining qualitative and quantitative information, examining current challenges and good practice and co-designing ideas for improvement.
We moved quickly to delivery, taking a ‘test and learn’ approach to designing and implementing interventions that demonstrated impact and informed their wider redesign.
Working as a blended consultancy and client team, we focused on delivering change through prototyped interventions – start small, iterate and scale – driven by a vision.
The combined team focused on areas of challenge and opportunities and used this to inform the council’s three-year plan. Together we mobilised two initial interventions in May 2023:
‘Conversations at the front door’ provided early strengths-based conversations with people that would relieve pressure on locality teams, reduce waiting lists and support people to get the right information and support earlier.
‘Maximising independence for working aged adults aged 18-64’ involved a virtual team, designed with frontline staff, that explored early intervention and support, ensured working age adults receive the right support at the right time, including early intervention and prevention.
The goal was to deliver better outcomes for people and prevent, reduce and delay the need for social care. This, in turn, would relieve pressure on social work teams and enable cost avoidance.
Further test and learn interventions were launched in July 2023 to deliver impact across adult social care. They included:
- A multi-disciplinary early support team
- Taking a co-production approach with residents to the ASC online offer
- An enhanced approach to ‘keeping in touch’ reviews
- Developing a new performance framework.
The two initial interventions had a significant impact:
- Through ‘conversations at the front door’, the new pilot service spoke with 2,900 people in four months. Practitioners found opportunities to prevent, reduce or delay long-term social care support for 40% of people, which lead to annual cost avoidance averaging £10,000 per person due to earlier access to information, advice and guidance that enabled people to maximise their independence.
- The ‘maximising independence for working aged adults’ intervention saw the three-person pilot team work with 40 people. For people new to adult social care, 68% were connected to alternative earlier support. Analysis found opportunities to prevent, reduce or delay long-term social care support for 80% of people – those new to social care and those already connected. Where cost avoidance could be estimated, this was an average of c.£50,000 annually for people known to the service and for new connections.
Overall, the first two test and learn interventions have produced cost avoidance opportunities of £1.4m per year.
To ensure long-term sustainability, the IMPOWER team have worked with over 75 council officers to build their skills to design and implement change. We have equipped them with a number of new approaches and interventions that will enable them to sustain and build on improvements. They include:
- Developing a trajectory management approach with the council’s adult social care team to enable them to understand how people flow through the system and to measure the impact of change on outcomes and financial metrics. Working with a wide range of officers, we’ve enabled them to put in place a consistent, evidence-based performance approach that empowers staff and teams to make informed decisions, improve performance and align actions with organisational goals.
- Linking transformation activities to the council’s adult social care Care Quality Commission self-assessment; working closely with ASC leadership to widen their ambition of what the future could look like based on evidence from the test and learn approach to deliver maximum value to the people of Wolverhampton in the most sustainable way for the council.
- Supporting long-term sustainability the council’s transformation team by upskilling via a series of workshops covering intervention design, implementation and monitoring, behavioural science and change management techniques – building their skills and working with IMPOWER colleagues to improve resilience.
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