Together with colleagues from the University of Surrey and King's College London, including Dr Adrian Banks and Dr Tim Rakow, my post-doctoral mentors, much progress has been made on developing decision support tools with North Yorkshire Council colleagues. We have now held four in-person workshops and will be holding another in December - at the workshops, we have provided training on the tools and collected data to inform iterative rounds of tool development. We have held four remote working groups and many meetings with North Yorkshire Council colleagues and the council has coordinated input from people with lived experience, the qualitative outputs of all of which have also fed into the development of the tools. We will be refining the tools further in November and December and we will be piloting them in the New Year. There has been an amazing commitment from colleagues at North Yorkshire Council, including senior managers such as the Head of Service, who is the project sponsor, and the Corporate Director, who attended the last workshop, and fantastic engagement with thirty or forty practitioners.
I have been strengthening networks with key stakeholders - I have met the Chief Social Worker for Adults, England, on a number of occasions and briefed her on our work, including the above project and planned new research, and she travelled to North Yorkshire Council to take part in the launch in-person workshop. I am in contact with the Senior Officer, Policy and Practice at the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and the Co-Chair of the National Network of Safeguarding Adults Boards who are also fully briefed on our work. I am giving a presentation on the North Yorkshire Council project and decision support tools to the London Principal Social Workers Network in December.