Children’s services vetting concerns

Concerns have been raised over how children’s services providers are vetted before being included on a signposting website launched by Rochdale Council and health chiefs.

Our Rochdale was set up by Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale Care Commissioning Group (CCG) and the council  in March as a way of creating a ‘one-stop shop’ for people to find out about health and social care providers.

It refers residents to council services and the authority’s website will also direct them to Our Rochdale.

Providers can upload their service details to the directory for free, which is then vetted before appearing on the website itself. 

There are currently around 1,500 entries on the site which receives in the region of 35,000 hits every month from just under 7,000 users.

But councillors raised questions over vetting and the ‘robustness’ of the site upon receiving a presentation from Mark Hicks, an IT manager at the CCG.

Councillor Janet Emsley said: “I can understand how you can say that, for example, an optician is qualified  to provide a service, but how do you know that for somebody who is providing a play centre. Who is accrediting the play centres?

“I understand childminders have to be done by certification, and I understand opticians and dentistry, but I don’t understand how you are quality assuring these services.”

Mr Hicks told the meeting that children’s services were already on the site under its previous guise as the Family Services directory before it was extended to include health and well-being information.

He said: “The family services team are the people that provide the administration for the site so, of the content that is on there, the family services and children’s related stuff, is the most mature and strongest content on the site.

“Because the owners of that service are also the custodians of the site, they are already aware of the quality of any play scheme submitted.”

He added: “I’m not quite sure what process is applied, it might just be based on their local knowledge so they say ‘yes, we know that’s a good local service so we’ll include it , or ‘we’ve never heard of this one, let’s do some extra checks’.”

Questioned on how the content on the website would be monitored and audited, Mr Higgs added that a email would be sent out to providers every 12 months – although the ambition was for this to be more frequent – and those who did not respond within a set time period would be deleted from the database.

He added that a review of health content and details posted through the Link4Life charity was ongoing and that ultimately auditing would be delegated to the most appropriate service.

But Councillor Paolucci said that she was not convinced that the site was ‘as accurate as it could and should be,’ while Councillor Jon Taylor also expressed concerns that 12-month checks were not frequent enough. 

Mr Hicks said it would never be possible for a resource such as Our Rochdale to be 100% up-to-date because of changing circumstances.

But he added: “Certainly if for any reason there was something flagged as cause for concern we need to make sure there’s a mechanism to remove things as immediately as appropriate.”

However Councillor John Blundell wanted further assurances.

He said: “I’m quite concerned that a council/ NHS website is potentially advertising services when we don’t know how they are vetted.

“It sounds to me like it’s not particularly robust, I would like a proper update on children’s services being signposted from the website.”

Nick Statham, Local Democracy Reporter