Key Working
PURPOSE OF SERVICE
Key Working is a service that provides children with disabilities and their families with a simple point of contact and enables them to have easy access to information, support and services to meet their needs.
DEFINITION OF KEY WORKER
• A source of support for children with disabilities and their families
• A link by which other services are accessed and used effectively
ROLE OF KEY WORKER
- • Providing information
- • Identifying and addressing the needs of all family members
- • Providing emotional and practical support as required
- • Assisting families in their dealings with agencies and acting as an advocate if required.
ELIGIBILITY
• Children with disabilities and their families, whose Social Care assessment score is 60 or higher, will be considered for a Key Worker service.
• As the scoring reflects the care complexity and the family’s circumstances, this system aims to ensure that the access to Key working is ‘needs led’. Families can of course refuse to have a Key Worker, despite the complexity of the case, if they so desire.
PROCESS
• Once the assessment is completed, the score will trigger a Key Worker Meeting.
• The people involved in this meeting; the professionals representing their agencies, the parents and young person, where appropriate, will decide who would be the most appropriate person to act as a Key Worker.
• There will be cases where training will need to be provided prior to the person being able to act as a Key Worker.
• In these cases, the Social Worker who completed the assessment would act as the Key Worker in the interim period.
• The meeting will also agree the specific duties to be undertaken as part of the Key Worker role.
• It is acknowledged that whilst the main duties of the Key Worker are detailed at the beginning of this report, there will be tasks specific to each individual case.
DEVELOPMENT OF KEY WORKER SERVICE
• As a Children with Disabilities Service, we are not, at present, in a position to create a dedicated Key Worker Service. However, this does not mean that the support is not available in other ways.
• For families whose children are open cases to the Children with Disabilities Team the allocated Social Worker will assume the duties of the Key Worker.
• The Portage Workers, who are part of the Early Support Programme act as Key Workers for the disabled children they are involved with.
• Discussions will take place with Health so that for disabled children under five, the Health Visitors take a lead role.
• Parents, if they wish, can also act as Key Workers, either for their children or for friends’ children and we, as a department, would need to look at ways we can recognise and reward this contribution either through an increase of their own service provision as an acknowledgement of the time spent as Key Workers, or financial remuneration.
• A Key Worker can be identified through the Common Assessment Framework, where specialist assessment is not required. A single common assessment gives a framework, which builds a clear individual picture of the child’s needs over time and reduces repetition of information gathering. It also identifies the most relevant agency to meet the child’s needs and this applies to cases where social work intervention is not identified as a need.
• A Child Wellbeing Meeting is arranged, where a lead professional is identified, and this will be the family’s Key Worker.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This proposal identifies flexible ways of Key Working, which looks at the individual child’s needs and avoids the involvement of too many professionals, which can be both intrusive and confusing for families.
Hopefully, this mixed menu will meet individual disabled children’s needs and their families.
Once the different systems are tested, we will analyse the families’ feedback in order to assess how useful the various models are.
We will also keep an open mind and continue to try and identify ways in which we could deliver the Key Working system in a cost effective way.
Letitia Swift
Business Manager
15.09.09
