Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) provides a range of health and social work services which have their own processes for how people access them. We have acknowledged that it can be confusing for the public and other agencies, and even staff, to know how to access individual services.

One of the main routes into the HSCP is via Social Care Direct. 

We carried out a review of Social Care Direct in 2019 and identified ways of improving these arrangements. We also held a range of consultation sessions with health and social care managers to identify all the different ways people access a service. Both the consultation and review confirmed that we needed to make it easier for people to contact us, access our services and that our assessment process should be standardised wherever possible.

To help people get the right help at the right time, the HSCP agreed to look at setting up a Single Point of Access (SPoA).

A SPoA will provide a more efficient ‘first contact’ model and will provide:

• improved advice, information and signposting
• more effective accessibility to services
• enable earlier assessment, intervention and 
• reduce demands on local services. 

Members of the public, staff, and agencies will be able to use the SPoA to obtain further information, request help, or get a service. 

Setting up a SPoA will involve many different factors and we will be doing this in phases.  Phase One will include the following Social Care Services:

• children & families
• homelessness, and 
• adults & older people services. 

Work is underway to determine Phase Two which will also include Alcohol Drug Recovery Services. 

The first phase of these new arrangements will replace our current Social Care Direct system. It will consist of a multi-disciplinary team with a mix of staff including Qualified Social Workers, Social Care Workers, Occupational Therapists and Admin staff. To allow for different social care needs there may be different ways to contact the SPoA, for example: 

• completing an online form
• making a phone call or 
• sending an email message 

The SPoA will also ensure that anyone contacting us will have has the same experience, using the same assessment process and reduced duplication for services.

We are currently working on the first phase of the SPoA, agreeing exactly which social care services will be included, how many staff and the different roles and tasks to be included.   Further work is underway to review some of our community health services and whether access to them could be improved via these arrangements.

Pat Togher, Assistant Chief Officer Public Protection & Complex Needs, said, “We remain committed to the development of our first contact arrangements – which will be known as ‘Single Point of Access’ for the HSCP. The new approach will deploy a model of earlier intervention/prevention and will serve most care groups reducing steps in the system for our patients and service users while reducing demand on local area teams.”

We will keep you updated on when we are ready to launch the SPoA.