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Cheshire West and Chester Council logoCheshire West and Chester

Vulnerable families with 0 to 2 year olds JSNA (2024)

Recommendations

  1. Prevent domestic abuse. Take steps to change attitudes, raise awareness of the signs and impact of domestic abuse. Be pro-active in prevention, identifying domestic abuse as early as possible to prevent situations escalating, reducing impact, and reducing likelihood of repeat by supporting recovery that builds resilience.
  2. Provide seamless support for families through a coherent joined-up ‘Start for Life’ offer available to all families across Cheshire West and Chester.
  3. Improve digital and virtual information, advice, and guidance for families in aiming to reduce barriers to access services and support available.
  4. Have a go to rather than opt in model that supports vulnerable parents/caregivers to build confidence in the system and promote relationships that are built on strengths and working in partnership with them. Improve data for this group by improving quality, evaluation, outcomes, and ability to safely share information across the partnership to improve service delivery.
  5. Ensure strengths-based identification of needs approach is taken by all services. Identifying needs in partnership with parents, children and young people using an approach that builds on their strengths as well as identifying any difficulties, supported by professional judgement used alongside formal screening and assessment tools.
  6. Prioritise early intervention and prevention in aiming to tackle increasing children in care.
  7. Understand the impact of the 0-19 Starting Well Service on children’s services contacts and TAF volumes. Understanding if, because of the model embedding an integration model are vulnerable families being provided with more universal services.
  8. Continue to deliver a universal offer at the earliest opportunity in a child’s life. Utilising an integrated model that includes midwifery, health visiting and children centres.
  9. Ensure that outcome measures are aligned between health and education (including early years settings) to enable shared responsibility for outcomes across the health, early help and prevention and social care systems.
  10. Develop and deploy strategies to engage with vulnerable families who have children aged 0-2 years and demonstrate improved outcomes for these families
  11. Explore opportunities to enhance parenting support services across the continuum of need, to offer more evidence-based interventions that will enable parental capacity to change.
  12. Continue to deliver parenting support services, potentially increasing these services to offer more opportunities for engagement.
  13. Work in partnership through a multi-agency approach to improve outcomes and reduce at the earliest opportunity.
  14. Prioritise service provision in local communities for vulnerable families with children aged 0-2 years based in the most disadvantaged areas across Cheshire West and Chester with an aim to improve outcomes for these families.
  15. Continue to take a robust approach to reaching families in the borough and, allocate resources to continue to improve both reach and outcomes for vulnerable families.
  16. Be more considerate of practical considerations to how we deliver our services. To inform this we will consider what we know about our vulnerable children aged 0-2 using localised data and research we have reviewed.
  17. Making sure that we consider how service providers engage with disadvantaged and socially isolated children and families.
  18. Develop a strategy for obtaining lived experience by way of authentic voice and evidence how this has been used to inform developments.
  19. The ‘Think Family’ concept needs to be disseminated and better embedded within adult social care and mental health services.
  20. Taking learning from local case reviews we will seek assurance from Starting Well Services and Early Help and Prevention that they are applying the criteria and Continuum of Need thresholds appropriately to ensure that vulnerable families can effectively access the right service at the right time in the right place.
  21. The Local Authority and ICB should take steps to assure the Safeguarding Children Partnership that the current arrangements for GP practices to have a link health visitor are appropriately joined up throughout the local GP network.
  22. Maximise the contribution that the Charity/Voluntary sector make in this space.