As Director of Adult Social Services (DASS), your role is essential in ensuring that adults receive the care and support they need to live fulfilling lives. This section summarises your key statutory responsibilities and the core components of your remit.
One of your primary duties is to be accountable for assessing local needs and ensuring the availability and delivery of a full range of adult social care services. This requires working with local people, NHS colleagues, voluntary and community organisations, and using both data and lived experience to understand need and shape services accordingly.
In addition to identifying need, you are responsible for ensuring that services are delivered to the appropriate standards. This includes implementing relevant legislation and regulations, promoting best practice, and driving a culture of continuous improvement.
You play a leading role in driving preventative approaches, enabling earlier interventions, and managing the cultural change required to give people more choice and control over their care. This includes tackling inequalities, improving access, and ensuring that people with the highest needs are well supported.
Your aim is to develop sustainable services that promote independence and reduce reliance on intensive forms of care. This means improving social inclusion and wellbeing, and considering the needs of families and carers in the planning and delivery of services.
A distinctive aspect of your role is to champion wellbeing and inclusion beyond the organisational boundaries of adult social care. You work with a wide range of partners to promote coordinated support that enables people to live independently and participate fully in their communities.
As the professional lead for adult social care, you are responsible for workforce planning and development. This includes working with local providers to ensure there are sufficient numbers of skilled staff, and that ongoing training and professional development supports a high-quality workforce. Maintaining the workforce needed to meet rising demand is one of the most pressing challenges.
Promoting a culture of person-centred care is central to your leadership. You are responsible for embedding approaches that place individual needs, goals and preferences at the centre of decision-making, while ensuring services promote equality, inclusion and diversity.
You also lead work to develop an integrated, whole-system approach to community support—working with health, housing, and other partners to deliver seamless services that improve outcomes. This includes promoting local access, ownership, and collaborative approaches that strengthen community resilience.
While the core statutory functions of the DASS are wide-ranging, the Care Act 2014 introduced additional duties which are now embedded into local authority responsibilities. These include shaping and sustaining the care market, ensuring continuity of care in the event of provider failure, and promoting wellbeing in everything the council does.
Your role is complex and challenging, but it is pivotal in securing high-quality care and support for adults in your area.