Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council 

Edge of Care Team

Briefly describe the initiative/ project/service; please include your aims and objectives

The edge of care team comprise of both female and male workers, they attend to children and families when in crisis and work on a 121 basis in the home to keep families together and teach new skills to prevent them entering into the court arena. This work is intensive, consistent and sometimes exhausting. Throughout the last twelve months, all 12 of the team have worked relentlessly, during the COVID pandemic, making sure children were seen, fed with gift baskets, baby milk, clothes donated from family and friends and kept the side going and mostly had an immense effect on keeping children safe and loved.

Coming up to Christmas again they have rallied round and obtained copious amounts of toys for the children who at Christmas would otherwise go without. I appreciate that they get paid for this job, however without the human touch and the passion for safety and wellbeing of children and families they would not be able to achieve the results for TMBC that they do, I believe this deserves recognition after this difficult year.

What are the key achievements?

Keeping 95% of families together, reducing costs to the local authority by preventing children entering the care system, showing parents how to care for their children preventing financial burden on other multi agencies who provide learning courses and parenting courses.

What are the key learning points?

The team are consciously learning new skills, from working through COVID they have learnt that they can all work together, endure a lot more than originally believed and have made a significant change to young peoples lives that will grow to give something positive back to society

Additional Comments

The team are a crisis response team, this means attending families addresses when they are in conflict, this could mean during their own family time, team members never refuse to go out either in work time or personal, I really do think that they go above and beyond constantly without breaks and deserve to be praised for this.