Diverse by Design for adult social care - the community and workforce relationship self-assessment tool

The community and workforce relationship self-assessment tool helps you complete a stocktake of your engagement with the communities you serve. There are three sections to the tool:

1. data and insights
2. engage, learn, plan
3. improve and transform

Each section has a series of discussion prompts. They are designed to help you to consider the community demographic data you hold, how you secure feedback from different groups of citizens and how you engage staff with community data and feedback to support their confidence and cultural competency.

The discussion prompts are aspirational. They aim to provide stretch and challenge. 

Please refer to the Diverse by Design for adult social care workbook if needed.

The workforce and the community self-assessment tools use the same scoring methodology. Both provide a framework for an open team discussion. We recommend you consider how this discussion can be set up to be representative of operational views and not just those of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) leads.

The tool can enable you to baseline levels of community engagement and involvement. As a result, we hope you will be even better equipped to articulate your EDI strengths and identify and plan for areas for EDI improvement.

We consider this tool as an enabler for work with several statutory frameworks: The Public Sector Equality Duty, the Care Act 2014, and the Care Quality Commission local authority assurance framework.

To support consistency in use, we've explained what each section of the tool is about.

This strand supports a discussion on engagement with your voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise sector (VCFSE). This is to aid your work with culturally competent service provision and enable a good overview of the individuals and groups that can support or advocate for people in your locality. The prompts help you examine the proactive place and integration agenda-based partnerships you have with VCFSE and grass roots organisations. 

You will be encouraged to discuss community data and insights and from where it is sourced. The discussion prompts help you consider your quantitative and qualitative community data with the aim of being mindful of 'who might be missing'. 

This section encourages you to consider feedback from community groups and ask yourself how well embedded it is and how it helps you foster a culture of continuous improvement. 

Your council will have a corporate vision for EDI. Some prompts in this section will help you to assess how well service leads and managers can articulate this vision and plan for improvements regarding the adult care and health service.

Some of the discussion prompts help you assess how well data and insights are proactively disseminated to improve staff understanding of equity access challenges, diversity, and population health in the communities you serve. Some prompts will help you consider how you action improvements at a service level, and how engagement-led you are with staff and communities.

This section will help you consider how you support confident practice. Lack of confidence can sometimes make it challenging for staff members to engage and explore issues with citizens. These prompts can help you uncover this and inform how you design and implement practical solutions.

Some of the discussion prompts help you to firm up a consistent process of exploring approaches to shared learning when things go wrong, as well as when they go right. This is to improve cultural understanding or address any experiences of discrimination as supportively as possible. 

The prompts will help you consider strengths-based practice. This is already well embedded in our sector, so some prompts aim to provide stretch to help us consider strengths-based approaches through the EDI lens.    
 

The prompts in this section support you to assess key roles in your team that focus on building trust and liaising with citizens. They help you think about how well integrated, and intelligence driven these are to improve services. 

In our sector, we aim to design services around the strengths of citizens and what is already working well. These prompts help you assess how well you are using true empowerment and delegation. They can help you consider inclusive practice from different angles.

These prompts help you work out how well you evaluate, and evidence care practices beyond the written words of a strategy. They help you help you assess your to end-to-end processes and delve into staff awareness of EDI issues in communities and consider the power of being even more proactive in ensuring equity of experience and outcomes. 

Our Diverse by Design adult social care self-assessment tool for baselining workforce and community relationship is available to view and download.

Download the tool