North Tyneside Council Adult Social Care is transforming the way it structures its Community Wellbeing teams and how they deliver their duties to meet Care Act 2014 statutory requirements.
The new approach has been carefully designed based on consultation with people who have experience of adult social care. It will allow teams to provide more personalised and flexible support while making it easier for the council to recruit and retain team members in social care. The aim is to increase efficiency and capacity, overcome recruitment challenges, reduce waiting times and improve the support on offer.
The response to people will be informed by and tailored to individual need, with targeted and personalised resource and support. It will mean that people have a named social worker during the assessment process. Once support is in place and following an initial review, they will then move to an annual review, unless continued, longer term support and intervention is needed from the CORE (Continuity, Outcomes, Resilience and Empowerment) team.
The previous model was based on where people live, with support teams for different localities around the borough. The new model will mean people get support from a centralised team regardless of which part of the borough they live in. This allows the teams to direct capacity to where demand is greatest, improving efficiency and outcomes.
North Tyneside Council’s adult social care teams have clear, agreed targets to reduce waiting times for assessment and review. This new model will help meet waiting times targets, by ensuring needs can be identified and support put in place more quickly. This will help towards preventing and reducing needs for care and support.
The new model involves recruitment of new team members. It creates roles for additional staff to help meet statutory duties and respond to growing demand for adult social care in North Tyneside, in the context of increasing national demand.
It is forecast that there will be a 10% increase in demand on North Tyneside’s adult social care services in the next year. No transformation would mean people wait longer, with delays to assessments and interventions and an increased risk to the borough’s most vulnerable residents.
A recruitment campaign is underway and the new structure will be introduced from 30 March 2026:
- Assessment and Support Planning team for people whose needs can be met, including through information, advice and signposting, and reviewed as needed in the shorter term.
- CORE team for people who have had an initial assessment, and a longer term approach to assessment and support is needed, including when professional intervention is the only support.
- Review team for people who already have support in place, focussing on planned reviews to make sure any support is still appropriate and proportionate to the person’s needs.
The new model will be continually assessed to identify ongoing improvements, with outcomes for people remaining the highest priority throughout the process.
For information about adult social care in North Tyneside, visit My Care.