Evaluation of Wiltshire Council's Advice and Contact Service

The Advice and Contact service provides guidance and information aiming to help its users find the support they need. They provide information about social care and other community support and aim to help people live as independently as possible. 

What did we do?

We gathered information in several ways:

• The Advice and Contact team sent or emailed our survey to some callers who agreed to this.
• We carried out telephone interviews to complete our survey with callers who had given consent for this.
• We carried out a mystery shopping exercise. Our volunteers made calls to the Advice and Contact team and asked questions based on five different scenarios.

What were the key findings?

• Most of those who contacted the team were calling about care assessments or care support for someone else.
• Overall, 63% of those we spoke to were very satisfied or satisfied with the service.
• Wait times were the top thing identified that people thought could be improved.
• Most callers thought they were given enough time during their call and wait times did not appear to affect the quality of information given.
• Some carers and relatives of those who would be funding their own care did not feel they were given enough advice and information to arrange care and support.
• Evaluation of our mystery shopping calls found considerable variation in the quality of responses and felt that some were more helpful than others. 
• Some of our respondents were satisfied with the call but were dissatisfied with the follow up and/or support that was available.

Next steps

Working in collaboration with the service, the findings of this report have been used to create a checklist for Advice and Contact team. This identifies aspects that were seen being most useful, with the aim that this can be used by team members to support them to improve the consistency of information given.

This report makes recommendations based on what people told us about their experience of the service and the findings of our mystery shopping exercise.