What are the day-to-day responsibilities of a Supported Living manager and how many hours should they work per day and per week?

Answered by Barry Price

I wish I could put it into writing a very clear and definitive answer to your question but if you know health and social care then you will realise this is an impossible question.

Whilst I can give you some pointers as to the kind of tasks you would face, it would be greatly affected on the type and size of service as well as the service user group and their associated needs as this can range from very light support to full 1:1 support, behaviours or health conditions that require varying ranges and levels of support.

These factors would feed in to how many hours you would be doing at the service as would the agreed funding levels around management support. It may be a service where initially there may be so many hours allocated to management tasks with any additional contracted hours made up supporting the service users. Some supported living service managers operate from numerous locations so your time may be shared across sites.

Without knowing the makeup of the service, you are asking about, this is as close as we can advise on your how many hours point.

Just a very small sample of what you may come up against on an average day.

Tasks and Responsibilities

• Recruitment
• Managing a staff team including rotas, time sheets, supervisions, appraisals, and team meetings
• Arranging staff training
• Ensuring staff are caring, supporting, respectful and personalised support is always provided
• Quality audits and reports
• Managing budgets for services
• Carrying out assessments
• Support service user involvement in;
  • Support planning
  • Management of the service
  • Recruitment and selection of staff
• Provide outcome focused and personalised support plans
• Promote a culture of active support, engagement in the community and promotion of independent fulfilled lives
• Supporting service users to pay bills and budget
• Travel training
• Independence training
• Shopping on a budget
• Dealing with benefit support issues
• Personal care
• Tenants house meetings
• Review meetings are held with service users, advocates, families, and commissioners
• Dealing with safeguarding issues
• Dealing with complaints
• Maintain/promote relationships with stakeholders and commissioners
• Work with housing providers to ensure accommodation is maintained to a high standard
• Ensure maintenance is carried out and any health and safety checks are performed in line with requirements
• Ensure CQC regulations are met, including sending notifications when required.

There are also some really good sources of information that you should read to enable you to understand the legal obligations of becoming a Registered Manager with the CQC and additional information below:

CQC – Regulation 7: Requirements relating to registered managers

https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-providers/regulations-enforcement/regulation-7-requirements-relating-registered-managers

Skills for Care – Managing a service

https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Leadership-management/managing-a-service/Managing-a-service.aspx

The Department for Health and Social Care – Registered manager

https://www.everydayisdifferent.com/social-care-job-roles/Registered-manager.aspx

If by this point you are still interested in this highly rewarding role, my advice would be contact one of your local supported living services and go and speak to the manager. There are some key differences that you would need to understand such as the separation between landlord and care provider, managing a house of multiple occupation and the rules and regulations that go with that. The differences between Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards in community settings as opposed to residential settings and domiciliary care.

Find out from them what the job means to them, and you will realise what a role it is indeed and the effect you can have empowering individuals to live in their own or a shared home being an active part of the community.