Growth and development.pdf

EdinburghRecruitment procedures were radically overhauled to address the shortage of home helps.Recruitment was centralised and the Council hired external premises as a single venue forgiving presentations to the large number of applicants, and for conducting interviews. To speedup the process, extra clerical staff were appointed and interviewers received additional training.From 1000 applicants, 200 were interviewed and 146 were appointed – triple the return from aprevious exercise at no greater unit cost.Measures have been taken to retain staff. The Council has established a Trainee Social WorkerScheme, which supports up to five staff through training, and a bursary scheme to subsidiseup to ten students.7. Modernising servicesThe ethnic population (almost 10,000 in 1991) is above the average rate for Scotland, particularlyfor people of Pakistani or Chinese origin. There are also around 2,000 refugees from a widevariety of cultures, religions, nationalities and ethnic backgrounds.The Council, both corporately and within social work, has a well-developed platform for raceequality work. A black and ethnic minorities consultation group is consulted regularly on servicedevelopments and there is an active black workers support group. A minority ethnic carersproject was launched after a successful pilot stage in 2001. The Khandan Initiative (Barnardo’sfamily placement service) won a Community Care award in the same year. The social workdepartment, jointly with housing colleagues, work to support up to 300 asylum seekers.Citizen Focus, a major project resourced by the Modernising Government fund and based on apartnership with BT, is designed to support online service delivery and a council-wide customer/property database. The social work department is negotiating improvement of outdated andfragmented client information systems within these corporate developments.All social work services, including residential children’s homes and residential schools, will belinked with PCs by the end of 2002, and there is provision for non-networked PCs for fosterchildren. Work in progress includes:• a study of the feasibility of linking the information systems of health, education and socialwork for looked after children; and• development of an online joint aids and equipment store with three other authorities andhealth, involving online self-assessment.101