residential care

Can you make things better for children and young people in Care whilst saving money?

That seems to be the critical question in an age in which there is no money in the budget to try anything innovative just because it will create improvement. To be able to try anything new that involves spending any money we have to evidence that double win of also saving costs. A few years ago when I was in the NHS, I found that really frustrating – I had so many ideas about how we could do things better by creating new services or better collaborations with other agencies, or reaching out to do the proactive and preventative work that would save money down the line, but it was almost impossible to get them off the ground because the budgets were so tight. Since then I’ve tried various things to unlock the spend-to-save deadlock, but it was only once we started looking at the economic impacts of some projects using BERRI that we had clear evidence that we could save money whilst making services better, and on a fairly substantial scale. Our pilot in Bracknell Forest saved £474,000 in the first 12 months whilst making services better and improving the outcomes for the young people involved. And that was just a small scale pilot within a single local authority.

After so many years of being told that improving outcomes whilst saving costs would be impossible it sounds unlikely, but it is true. We made life better for the children involved – in some cases in ways that entirely changed the trajectory of their lives – whilst reducing costs for the local authority. The savings generated would be enough to fund services to address the mental health needs of all Looked After Children whilst still lowering the overall cost of Care. I’m not prone to hype, but that feels pretty extraordinary! Importantly we did it whilst also making life easier for the carers, professionals and placement providers involved. So it is no great surprise that we are now working with many Local Authorities to scope out and deliver wider scale projects.

So, what are we doing that is different? And where do the savings come from? Using BERRI we are identifying psychological needs effectively, and then addressing them early. For some young people that leads to significant change in their behaviour, risks or mental health, that then opens the door to different placement options, and for a small proportion of children the placement costs are substantially reduced. I’m not talking about forcing children in residential care to move to foster placements for financial reasons. I’m talking about better identifying the types of placements and services that young people need. For some, that will mean that they get to access residential care without having to break down a long series of foster placements to do so. For others it will mean that they get access to much increased mental health input, or specialist services. For many it will mean helping their carers to better understand their needs so they can make minor adjustments to the day to day care. But for some children it can open (or reopen) the doors to a family placement.

It may also have an impact on their longer-term trajectory, as it is well known that addressing mental health needs in childhood is easier and more cost effective than trying to address the difficulties they go on to develop in adulthood if these needs are not addressed. Using the BERRI helps carers to see behind the presenting behaviours and to recognise emotional, relational or attachment needs, or feel empowered to support these more empathically. Importantly, it can evidence the impact of the great work that many carers and organisations are doing already to support children by showing the changes they are making over time. It can help to set goals to work on, and to monitor what is and isn’t working effectively to create positive change. BERRI also helps to pick up learning difficulties, neurodevelopmental difficulties and disorders, so that children can then be more thoroughly assessed and care and education can be pitched appropriately.

We are also learning from our increasing data set what scores are typical in different settings, how individual children compare to the general population, and which variables are important in preventing negative outcomes in adulthood.

I sometimes use the metaphor of the cervical cancer screening programme. At a cost of around £500 per woman each 3-5 years, the screening programme prevents 2000 deaths per year. About 5% of women screened have abnormal cells, and 1-2% have the type of changes that are treated to reduce risk. As a result women who are screened are 70% less likely to get cervical cancer, which has an enormous human cost, but also costs £30,000+ to treat. Screening has saved the NHS £40 million. Most importantly it has led to the discovery that the human papillomavirus is significant in the development of cervical cancer. This has led to preventative treatment programmes with 10 million girls in the UK receiving the HPV vaccination. This has reduced the rates of cervical cancer (with 71% less women having pre-cancerous cervical disease), as well as preventing genital warts (by 91% in immunised age groups). It also has the potential to reduce other forms of cancer, as HPV is responsible for 63% of penile, 91% of anal, and 72% of oropharyngeal cancers, with this and the importance of herd immunity leading to the decision to immunise boys as well as girls in many countries.

I would argue that the case for psychological screening, particularly in population groups that have experience trauma, abuse or neglect, is even stronger. More than half of children in Care have a diagnosable mental health condition, and half of the remainder have significant mental health need that doesn’t reach diagnostic thresholds or doesn’t fit into a diagnostic category. They also go on to higher risks of a range of negative outcomes than the general population, including having a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, strokes, fractures and numerous other health conditions, as well as more than fifty times higher risk of homeless, addiction, imprisonment, requiring inpatient mental health care, or having their own children removed into Care. Like cancer, these have an enormous human cost on the individual and their network, and they also have a huge financial cost for the public purse (some estimates suggest £2-3 million per young person leaving Care, when including lower contributions to tax, increased benefits and the cost of services). If we can understand and address the issues that lead some young people down these more negative paths, and address those needs as early as possible in their lives, hopefully we can increase the proportion of young people who survive difficult early lives and go on to healthy happy adult lives.

If you want to learn more about BERRI and the impact it can have on your services feel free to get in touch. Or you can come and learn more about the pilot in Bracknell Forest and the larger scale projects we have started to expand on it, as I am presenting at the NCCTC next month with Matt Utley from the West London Alliance.

Gaining Influence

Quite a long time ago, I identified that it gives me most satisfaction when work gives me the opportunity to have 5 I’s: Intellectual challenge, Independence, Innovation, Income and Influence. This month I have really been working on the last of those, and trying to connect with the right people to make change within the Looked After Children sector as a whole, rather than individual by individual or company by company.

It transpires that over time I have accidentally built up a wide professional network, and a credible platform from which to connect with higher level influencers. It seems that all the time I’ve invested into unpaid stuff helps when it comes to connecting with new people and looking like I know what I’m talking about. This is helpful for me to hold in mind as committee work can all too often feeling like a drain on my time that is almost invisible to anyone else and may have little that is tangible as an outcome for what can be quite an onerous process. Logically I know that this type of activity is rewarded by the innate satisfaction of contributing to important work that needs doing, but this is something I find easier to recognise at the start of the process when I first put up my hand to volunteer and after the end of all the graft than whilst in the middle of it.

Being chair of CPLAAC, on the national CYPF committee for the BPS, part of the NICE guidance development group and the BPS/FJC standards group have let me contribute to various publications that will hopefully reach wider audiences and influence practice. Whether that is in terms of the support and interventions offered for children with attachment problems or the standards that should be expected of psychologists who act as experts to the family courts or the chapter on best practise for psychological services for children and families with high social care needs in What good looks like in psychological services for children, young people and their families, the paper I wrote about Social Enterprises as a vehicle for delivering psychological services or the CFCPR issue I edited on good clinical practise around attachment difficulties, I feel like I have been part of some good work that establishes professional standards and reference points.

And with those things on my CV and a network of allies who share my goals about improving outcomes for Looked After Children, I have been able to meet with various decision makers and influencers about my ideas. The first important contact I made was with Jonathan Stanley, the chair of the Independent Children’s Homes Association. He has been fantastic at promoting my work to residential care providers and helping me to gain a seat at the table. I then met Almudena Lara at the DfE, although she was very new to the role of being LAC lead, and moved on before she was able to pick up our discussion again. I have also met with Social Finance. More recently I was able to meet with Sir Martin Narey, the government advisor (and ex-chair of Barnardos) conducting a review of children’s homes in the UK, and a representative of the DfE. And latterly I had the opportunity to meet Lord Listowel at a recent conference and hope to speak with him further soon.

In all of these meetings, I have been promoting the value of clinical governance in the social care sector. That is, the importance of being able to evidence clinical outcomes and substantiate that you are doing what you claim to do – in this case, that placement providers are improving outcomes for children and young people in their care. My wider goal is to allow commissioners, social workers and Ofsted to be able to see what kind of placement a child needs, whether a placement is making positive change for a child and who can provide the most suitable and effective placement. I’m also keen that the idea of “therapeutic care” is better defined, and that therapists working within care organisations need to be qualified, supervised, regulated by a professional body and practice within their areas of competence. But my main goal is to stop the situation in which placements are paid to provide care for the most complex and vulnerable young people in society, and do so by providing accommodation, food and transport to education but do nothing to address their emotional, behavioural, mental health, developmental/learning needs, risk to self and others, or ability to form healthy relationships with others. I think the tools I have been developing, like http://www.BERRI.org.uk, and the training I provide for staff/carers can help with that, but my goal is nothing less than to change the culture of care in the UK.

Evidence has shown that money invested in the most complex children during their childhood is repaid tenfold in savings to the public purse in reductions in use of mental health, social care and criminal justice services over their lifetime. So why is it that the placements for the most complex children and young people are primarily provided by carers with very low levels of qualification and training? The first steps to improving standards are to ensure that all carers in the foster and residential sector get training about managing the impact of trauma and disrupted attachments, and that all children in public care are regularly monitored on outcome measurements. But these need to be meaningful, and linked into practice, rather than done as hoops to jump that are disconnected from daily care.

I can think of nothing more worthwhile to do with my professional life than to improve care for Looked After Children in the UK, and I hope that I can achieve enough reach and influence to make a genuine difference.