Ealing Council’s adults team provides a wide range of services to local people and communities in line with national legislation and locally driven goals. We help individuals to maximise their independence and wellbeing through support from their community and family networks, whilst also working to prevent and respond to concerns about their safety. These aims and our strategies to meet them are defined within the Better Lives programme which has been implemented across the service.

Better Lives focuses on community opportunities which could help to support people and their carers to be as independent as possible, for as long as possible. It encourages early interventions which provide access to community resource and advocates strength-based assessments which engage with customers, their families, and wider community networks.

Like all councils, Ealing has faced significant financial challenges for several years, but Better Lives is something we would have been doing anyway. Promoting independence and a strengths-based approach are central to social care ethics and practice. In most cases enabling people to meet their needs alone or with the support of their wider-network or community is preferable to state interventions.

Within the Ealing adults service, we have hundreds of colleagues who are committed to the community we serve and who work in a myriad of different roles. Better Lives is key to all our roles and is closely aligned with the wider council’s values and behaviours.

We recognise that to recruit and retain the very best social workers and social care practitioners, we need to bring together all our learning and development opportunities into one place. That’s why we have launched the Ealing Social Care Academy. The academy helps our team connect, collaborate, and engage creatively with internal and external partners and service users.

Kerry Stevens, Ealing Council’s strategic director of adults and public health