A year of change!
Recent times have been very busy and full of change for the team at Rathbone. As part of a major restructuring of our Outreach Service, we have bid a fond farewell to some old faces and their posts. Our Business Manager Pippa retired in December, her function being replaced by Accountability EU, a specialist Voluntary Sector financial management service. Our Team Administrator Jacek headed off to pastures new (well, training to be a Southern rail driver!) and his full time Admin function has been happily shouldered by our hard working Team Managers.
As part of our new structure, we have been extremely happy to welcome The award winning Without Walls team from Lambeth into the service, Without Walls are a specialist complex/challenging behaviour team, whose aim is to support people to remain in their own homes and community, by developing positive behaviour support plans and working to reduce and manage behaviours that less specialist services struggle to cope with.
We have also opened a Drop-in Service, based at the Old Library in West Norwood, which is aimed at providing a flexible, responsive service to people with fluctuating needs, as well as providing group activities and IT resources to enable people to manage their support needs in either 1:1, or group activities.
Last but not least, following our pilot scheme in partnership with the Timewise Foundation we are in the process of reorganising our community based support workers into north Lambeth and South Lambeth focused teams. This is to facilitate both smaller teams of workers supporting people, and to improve efficiencies in terms of more regular/smaller team meetings and a decrease in travel time required.
Overall it has been a difficult and challenging process, but we have enjoyed both a high level of support from the fantastic staff at Lambeth Social Services (both Social Work and Commissioning colleagues) and a huge amount of goodwill and support from the most important people of all, those we exist to provide services to.
Jamie Sawyer, Head of Support Services