City of York Council has welcomed a Social Services Inspectorate report which recognises the quality of current services for the city's older people but says more needs to be done to plan for their future needs.

The SSI report, which follows an inspection of the council's services for older people in the summer, recognises that the city's older people are satisfied with the services they receive from the council's community services department.

But the SSI concludes that more needs to be done by the council to plan for future needs - something which the council has already recognised in its own review of services for older people last year.

The new report comes after the highly complimentary joint Department of Health and SSI report into the whole social services department in 1999 and praise from Secretary of State for Health Alan Milburn in October. He placed York in the country's top ten social services providers.

The council has also been able to report high performance figures in key government indicators including those for services provided to older people.

The new SSI report will be discussed at next week's council Approvals/Social Services Committee (Wednesday, January 9) and acknowledges: satisfaction levels of around 90 percent amongst existing service users the benefit to older people of having a combined housing and social services department the council's good record on consulting services users and carers a tradition of close collaboration with health partners in planning services for older people the difficulties of strategic planning given radical changes in the NHS

Today Jim Crook, the council's director of community services, said, "The inspection of services for older people was highly professional and very thorough but, reassuringly, it has not highlighted anything we didn't know already and - more importantly - anything we hadn't already begun to address.

"The very nature of such reports means that by the time they are published work on any areas for improvement is usually underway - but in this case we were already tackling many of the issues raised during the inspection."

Councillor Bob Fletcher, the council's executive member for social services, said, "After the excellent DOH/SSI report in 1999 we always said we would not be resting on our laurels and we are grateful to the Inspectorate for identifying areas in which they think we can perform better.

"It is really encouraging to note that much of the work highlighted in the report is already under way and that we have a mutual understanding of the issues we are facing in developing and providing high quality services for older people in the future."

The council began reviewing the future needs of older people in 1999 when it commissioned the Nuffield Institute to study the issue as part of a Best Value review of services for older people.

Mr Crook said, "In our opinion, the prospects for improvements are good.

"We had already taken steps to boost the strategic capabilities of the department and created a new assistant director's post for adult services around a new structure aimed at strengthening the integration of housing and social care to benefit older people.

"Assessment and care management arrangements in the department are also under review and this will address many areas for development identified in the report."

Mr Crook also stressed that councillors had already agreed to develop proposals involving planned investment in services for older people over a period of five years.

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